


All I Was Doing Was Breathing

by magistralucis (Solitary_Shadow)



Series: The Consolations of Philosophy [12]
Category: Daft Punk
Genre: (or several), AU, Angst, Based on a Real Life Event, Character Death, Diary/Journal, Drug Use, Erotic Dreams, Hedonism, Human!Daft Punk, Literary References, M/M, NSFW, Parisian Geography, Slash, Slice of Life, Tragedy, Unreliable Narrator, Unresolved Sexual Tension, introspective, philosophical
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-17
Updated: 2015-08-12
Packaged: 2018-04-09 05:00:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 55,725
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4334822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Solitary_Shadow/pseuds/magistralucis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Don't leave me.</i>
</p>
<p>An AU based on a real event; suppose that during that fateful night of 1994, only one of them survived the oncoming truck. Suddenly faced with a grief that he is in no way prepared to accept, the one left behind begins to write a diary of mourning, hoping that something valuable will come of it.<br/>But no one ever said that healing was that straightforward.</p>
<p>[Thomas/Guy, extremely depressing, not a light read. But I guarantee that it will be worth it. NSFW in parts.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Mourning Becomes Sisyphus

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Disclaimer: I do not know any of the members of Daft Punk, this is strictly a work of fiction and I do not profit from nor claim to represent true aspects of their lives in this story.**
> 
>  
> 
> Dedicated to someone who will probably never read it.  
> But that's okay. Sometimes people merely cease to be in other people's worlds, that's all. And in the vanishingly unlikely event that you do read it, you probably know who you are. I'll say no more.
> 
> [This story is being betaread by multiple people. As of posting this first chapter, some sections at the end of this part may be updated with some small edits and line breaks because of this; edits to this can be ongoing!  
> Much thanks to my betareaders, I cannot forget to credit them for every part.]

**All I Was Doing Was Breathing (Part 01) -** ' _Mourning Becomes Sisyphus'_

**\--------------------**

**25 January**

I went to your funeral.  
I cried.  
Then I went home that was not home.

The formal beginning of this long bereavement, the acknowledgement of this loss.

**26 January**

One o'clock, the skies are starless and bleak.  
My first proper mourning night.

Who knows - maybe something of value in those notes.

**26 January**

Six thirty, not as pitch black outside as before.  
The rattling of trash cans, humming engines, the restrained calls of truck drivers.

**26 January**

I remember that whenever you slept over, you would stir awake at those sounds, and lie in bed staring at the ceiling.  
When I asked you if everything was all right you would answer with not an intangible relief that the night was over at last.

Then you would close your eyes and spiral back into sleep.

I used to watch you. You always slept so serene.

**26 January**

I don't know if you sleep like that _now_. They wouldn't let me see you.

Nor did they let anyone else for that matter.

**27 January**

I think everyone can guess at the intensity of a bereavement from looking at it. Whether it's a funeral procession you pass by as you come home with the groceries, or personally watching someone mourn their loss, or witnessing a fictional one from afar. It works across all mediums. When one looks at something like that, they're tapping into a very _human_ feeling, one that we all possess - what we can feel as a cold, deep-seated instinctiveness even when young, or when we're without reason to care about this particular loss.

But I think it is never possible to measure just how _much_ someone is afflicted.  
Nor do I think we ought to ever make a serious attempt at doing so. It's contradictory and disrespectful.

**27 January**

One full week since you were gone, forty-eight hours since you returned to the embrace of earth.

It's pointless to count the days now, as if you were capable of returning at the end. This is now my reality.

**27 January**

Maman bought some macarons and put them outside my door. I threw them all away.  
They're the vanilla-bean ones I was asking for just over a week ago, you remember, the ones from that place in _Rue Lepic_. The new ones that I tasted just once and yearned for desperately, ever so tragically, like I would never to get to eat another. She bought me an entire bag's worth and now I can't bear to look at them. The desires I had before can no longer be fulfilled, because that would mean that it was your absence that allowed me to fulfil them; I could have had you, endless longing for vanilla, and no macarons, or I could have had macarons and no you.

That's only a very shallow example, but it's one of countless many.  
But losing you has changed me. I no longer desire what I used to desire. I must wait, supposing that I _can_ wait and such a thing is possible, for new desires to form - desires wholly following your absence.

**27 January**

I have had to leave my room. The vanilla scent is inescapable.

Across the river to the _place de la Sorbonne._  
In front of the frothing, never-ending fountain: sad/gentle/ _deep_ (relaxed).

**29 January**

I spent the past day in my room, crying. You were meant to come over last night, do you remember? We'd have gotten dressed and headed over to the _Silencio_ together. One by one the days fall past and the notes I scribbled on each calendar square become irrelevant, whether from simple time's passage or the impossibility of the task in question being fulfilled. All night the phone rang, and just from that alone I knew that no one _else_ we'd planned to go with had actually gone. Mourning in their own terms, but making time for me. To check that I was all right. It makes me feel worse that I didn't answer a single call. It's a given that I'm not okay, and that I don't feel like talking, but at the same time I feel that my condition doesn't justify ignoring all of those people.

You were meant to come back with me. I was meant to see the dawn of the twenty-ninth with you, the two of us giddy with drinks and whatever we'd managed to score at the club, and collapse on the floor of my room to sleep it off until midafternoon. Around two in the morning you'd have gotten up and placed a pillow under our heads, maybe. No different to any other amazing night out. But now I'm alone and I have nothing but the memories of you and this diary to assuage my pain.

How am I going to manage all by myself?

**30 January**

But at the same time it's clear that there is no other place.

**30 January**

To every man his little cross, until he is dead and is forgotten.  
To each their own rhythm of suffering.

\-----

**01 February**

Not even a fortnight gone and life has begun the first of its grand interferences into my grief. Essay due on the fifth, fifteen pages max., regarding to what extent children learn language via mimicry. I put in an extension request because this is the last thing in my mind right now - grant me two weeks, no, one week, just so I am _mentally prepared_ for what is to come in the next few days.

I wait and I hope - but until then, I'm staying next to you.

Over here it is night, eight o'clock in the evening exactly. Today I actually managed to sit down for dinner with Papa and Maman; they looked relieved, kind of, though they said little about it. The food tasted bland, but then most everything has for the past couple of weeks. Quiet, but uneasy atmosphere; I was glad to leave it.

Part of me keeps a despairing sort of vigil; and at the same time, another part struggles to put my trivial affairs into _some_ kind of an order. I should have done this, could have done that better, and so on. The garden doesn't _not_ need watering because you are gone, I still need to go to class, there's an essay to write, there are people I still need to meet if only to tell them that our projects cannot go ahead. I want nothing more than for time to stop its relentless march until I am over this grief, but the world refuses to wait for me - it is forever rushing, progressing, trivializing you with its accursed flow - and that makes me resent the world in turn.

This is the sickness you have gifted me.

**02 February**

No extensions granted. I can't believe this. But so much time has passed that I don't have much of a leg to stand on.

I have to finish this assignment.

I'll come back soon. I promise. Please wait for me.

 **03 February** (midnight; taking break)

 _Spend the years of learning squandering_  
_Courage for the years of wandering_  
_Through a world politely turning_  
_From the loutishness of learning._

\- From Beckett.

**05 February**

Just made the deadline. I thought it would take maybe a day at most to write, I'd made notes for most of it. But I overestimated how willing I would be to sit down, shut off my brain and _write_ , I think, for writing this diary and writing an assignment are two completely different things. As far as I'm concerned that particular essay was mere busy work, of no ultimate importance, while this comes straight from my heart. I need to be fully engaged with this endeavour if I'm to make anything out of those notes.

They offered some token sympathies when I went to hand in the essay. I'd put down why I asked for the extension, doubtless the word got around. The implications I got from those words amounted to nothing of any importance - they were sorry for my loss, they hoped that it wouldn't impact my work, I ought to take care of myself, and such. Take care of yourself, but be sure to work, even if it hurts you. Right. Ha. I got it.

It doesn't matter, though. It doesn't matter...

I have lost you, and right now there is a void in me that I cannot hope to fill on my own.  
Healing first, then I'll be ready to return to the impersonal world of academia.

I need to protect you.

**05 February**

Reminder:  
Meet Laurent and others, _Silencio_ trip expected. (Slip out before ten o'clock) - 11th.  
Groceries: ~~rice~~ couscous/lettuce/chicken/potatoes/shallots  
_Le Parisien_ for Papa.

**06 February**

Awful migraine the past few days, followed by a fever. It has not gone. I am glad for it. Let me be broken before the eighth.

**06 February**

Afternoon. Still unwell, but clinging on. That this death fails to destroy me altogether means that something in me still struggles madly - wildly - passionately in order to live. Does that not therefore mean that my own fear of death is still there, not having been displaced a single inch?

**07 February**

Dear God.

**07 February**

I almost want to lie about feeling better.

**08 February**

Our Lady of Paris rings her bells.  
There are some mornings, so sad...

**08 February**

There's a box wrapped in gold paper and tied off with ribbon in the corner of my room and I can't bear to touch it

If you saw it the last time you were here thank you for never mentioning it

...

They're calling me to come downstairs now. Church. I've got five minutes.

**08 February**

...

 _Bon anniversaire, mes vœux les plus sincères._  
_Que ces quelques fleurs vous apportent le bonheur_  
_Que l’année entière vous soit douce et légère!_

_Et que l’an fini, nous soyons tous..._

_réunis..._

_..._

_Pour chanter en chœur...  
"Bon anniversaire!"_

**08 February**

In lieu of a birthday present your brother wrote and read you a small eulogy.  
I reproduce it here. I like to think that you were listening, so it might be redundant - but just in case.

_Not a day goes by that I don't replay the last night I saw you on this earth. I'm haunted by how it all happened so quickly, with you only a few miles away from home, so close and yet too far for us to reach in time. And what if we hadn't done all the things we did that night, would you still be here today? If I'd stayed on the phone a minute longer, if I'd never been asleep, if I'd stayed awake long enough to tell you that if you stayed there, we'd come and take you back home? What if I had known while you were on the phone, sounding rapid and breathless, that it would be the last time I would get to talk to you? Why didn't I notice earlier that something must have been wrong?_

_There isn't an answer to all those what ifs and maybes and whys. Or rather, it's the case that I have no way of answering them.  
But I'm your brother. I was by your side for all of those years. I was meant to know you more closely than anyone else did, and it hurts me endlessly that I didn't pick up on your tone of voice, and that I didn't do anything about what was so obviously going wrong. I can't help but blame myself for the loss of you. I'm still here - we both got up to the same amount of mischief, had plenty of close shaves, but just because I was home that night and you weren't, God took you and not me. Maybe that's alarming to hear, but it's true. Speaking from the depths of my heart, if I could have gone instead, I would have. _

_But I'm here and I'm left to pick up the pieces and for the sake of you and our family, by God, I'll do my best.  
But right now? I just want you back. _

_I'm sorry that we're saying all of this so late. When we buried you we didn't have the words. It's been two weeks since your funeral. Long enough for us to understand that we have no idea how to manage the next two months without you, let alone the next two years, four, six, twenty. You are everywhere and nowhere, now that our family is less than a collective one. It feels as if you only just left, and that we missed you walking out of the door by mere seconds; every night we're just waiting for you to walk back in, jacket slung over your arm, slumping down on the sofa and reaching for the remote. Your records are still stacked on the floor, your bed is made and the last shirt you changed out of is still there, only that it's been folded and set on your pillow. Sometimes one of us forgets and sets the table for four, and then none of us can bear to eat anything, being reminded of you who can never return to us. You said we ought to change the message on the answering machine - the one you recorded when you were sixteen - and offered to re-record it at some point. But I don't think we ever will change it, now. Not for a very long time._

_You always promised me that you would never leave me alone in this world. That didn't happen, but it wasn't your fault. It wasn't a promise I'd have blamed you for being unable to keep, especially not now, not that I've seen how quickly and unknowingly a life can be over; you are no longer suffering, at least. But there aren't words to describe just how much I miss you, and maybe I'll live my entire life without being able to describe it. I almost don't want to, out of the fear that that'll mean I accepted any part of your death, since the step after acceptance tends to be forgetting. Maybe you'd have wanted us to forget and move on. But for now, at least, this pain is going nowhere._

_They say that to die would be an awfully big adventure but they almost never think of the people left behind.  
Still, if you can, wait for me a while. One day I'll be able to join you, and we'll go adventuring together, the way we did when we were younger. Until then, our blue-eyed dreamer, our-_

I have to omit your name. I'm sorry. It's been too soon and I don't want to make this more real for myself.  
I'm so selfish.

**08 February**

Horrible day. More and more wretched. I can't stop crying.

**08 February**

I'd had your present bought months beforehand. I mentioned it earlier, didn't I?

I have.  
Well, here it is.

Two bottles of butterscotch schnapps, and a crystal schnapps glass, for your eyes and lips only. Two nice large bottles. I'd have mixed you up a cocktail, too, when you opened the box and brought out the bottles. Butterscotch schnapps and a dash of Irish Cream was what you liked to drink. You'd do a few shots of that and be ready to party, in less than ten minutes.

Back then, anyway.

But that was weeks ago and now I'm stuck with one and half litres of butterscotch schnapps that I can neither stand to drink nor regift to anyone else. Not that I don't like butterscotch schnapps - it's nice on its own - but it's just _dumb_ , you know? It's just _dumb_. These bottles were _yours._ The experiences that would have come of it were ours. I don't know what I mourn more, the fact that you aren't capable of _ownership_ now, or that we can't share things any more.

**08 February**

Maman looked in and asked me if I wanted anything.  
Yes. I'd like to lie down and not do anything and not feel anything for the rest of my life. But I couldn't say that - couldn't just demand things from her like the _child_ I used to be, mere weeks ago - so I said nothing until she sighed, stroked my hair and went away. I can't bring myself to say anything to Maman, not when a _different_ Maman is downstairs, watching _her_ footsteps wander up the stairs, hearing _her_ voice calling out to me, all the while knowing that her own child can't demand anything of her ever again.

I haven't the courage to face her. I am staying here. It's cowardly but I can't help myself

**08 February**

If our friends saw me doing this they'd be unbearably disgusted with me.

But I already tore the gift wrap off. Might as well go all the way

Here's to you.

**08 February**

On second thoughts I think that I miss sharing the most.  
You could have had nothing and I'd have given you what you needed  
You could have been dirt poor and I'd have done anything to help you  
Everything in this room are just _things_ and I'd have sold off all of it so you could flourish

At least you'd have been there.

Sure you might not have been laughing or happy  
But I could have helped you laugh again.

You'd have smiled again...

... at me, all for me, for my sake.

And you'd have been _there_.

...

this drink isn't strong enough

**08 february**

HELLO WHERE ARE YOU

**08 february**

might have broken the schnapps glass. whoops

got myself a wineglass instead

but it didn't feel right to drink schnapps in it  
so i saved that for later. precious, precious liquor. come to my arms

~~tripping all over the fucking stairs jesus christ~~

but you know wineglasses belong with wine and it's a perfectly good wineglass.

shame to waste it.

**08 feb.**

you are no longer suffering, they said  
but in that sentence to whom does 'you' refer? what is the meaning of that present tense?

**08/09 (???)**

you always filled the wineglass exactly half full whenever you drank, and never a centimetre more or less. i used to think you were excessively polite or just very quaint for doing that

haha

but it's midnight and i'm doing the same thing now and there's a beauty in it  
(whether it's the same beauty you saw i don't know.)

have you ever looked closely at a half empty glass of wine?  
half full maybe? i don't know shit about your worldview oh my god i really am a bad friend  
please don't hate me i'm trying i promise

i mean

have you ever looked at a glass  
of wine  
that's at half-capacity?  
or looked at the world through a glass of wine that's at half-capacity? that's better

i'm performing this exact experiment now and this is what i observed.  
the top half shows things clear. the clear half. everything's pretty much how they are. it might be warped here and there because of how the glass distorts it, but everything is seen pretty much how they are. but the bottom half, there isn't much to be made out of that at all. dark red reflection, what little you can see tinted, upside down, and distorted.

but it adds a splash of colour to an otherwise colourless world. the bottom half draws me in more than the top does.  
i would take this over seeing what's in plain sight any day.

the raw shade of reality does nothing but wreck your complexion.

i look through the bottom of the glass and it's fucked up but it's very pretty. beautiful.  
broken and appealing at the same time.

it's a metaphor for my life i think  
or yours. that colour on its own probably is a metaphor for some kind of life  
or the lack of it rather...

...

i'm sorry  
i'm drunk  
i don't know what i'm saying.

...

this red is doing nothing for me

...

pour, oh pour, the pirate sherry...

**11 February**

Laurent came over today.

I have been in a state of chaos the past few days. No doubt my diary entries have been proof enough of that, not that I want to read them over and find out; not just yet. I've thoroughly embarrassed myself that night as it is, spending the entire night drunk out of my mind, spilling wine on the stairs and refusing to clean it up. Just as well the floor there wasn't carpeted, but anyway. No one's said anything, but out of shame and a days-long hangover I've been keeping quietly to myself. Day in, day out - coming out for snacks and a drink of water now and then, and to shower off every morning, but nothing else.

I'm losing track of the story.  
Laurent. Yes.

He came upstairs and knocked on my bedroom door at roughly four o'clock in the afternoon. Papa must have let him in. I hadn't been expecting to see him here, but I wasn't surprised to see him, _per se_ ; I haven't seen our friends the past two weeks and I felt obliged to show my face at least once, just to confirm to them that I was still here. You have to do that every now and then, and all. Tonight was the date we agreed on, and though they were planning to go to _Silencio_ afterwards (free shots; subdued music; quieter nights of the week), I'd planned to slip away before then. I'd banked on them understanding why I would want to do something like that. But it's not as if I kept in regular contact with them since, so Laurent probably came over to check up on me, to see if I was still up for it.

I say 'probably' because he said nothing about this when he came in. Very little time was spent on us asking each other if we were all right. I think he felt no need to ask.

...

He was very wan-looking, about as much as Maman worriedly told me that I was getting. His eyes still had focus, but they had a faint veil to them, and while he was responding to what attempts at conversation I was attempting to make, it was clear that his mind wasn't really in it. He didn't look as if he'd rather have been elsewhere, but that worried me ever more because that made me unsure where he _really_ wanted to be; if not home, if not the clubs, nor my room, then where?

Your disappearance has taken away the homes of many.

...

I mixed him a cocktail. Butterscotch schnapps (he never knew that it was a gift for you) and amaretto, not quite your favourite but close, and a mixture Laurent had never tasted before. He took a while to get into it, but by the time he reached the last inch he was downing it with ease. I silently poured him another and he drank that down as well, and only then did he really began to talk, though none of it enchanted me in the slightest. It turned out that he too was disapproving of the choice to go to _Silencio_ , and was wondering out loud _why there of all places, so close to where it happened_ \- the same things I wondered, myself, and only did not protest because I had no energy to do so. By all means we were on the same side, we ought not to have been arguing.

But argue we did.

"You're just as bad as them. Hell, even a flat no would have sufficed. We'd have all understood. Didn't you know that this outing depends entirely on you, knowing who you were," I opened my mouth to protest but he cut me off. "it's true. Don't argue with me. You've gone outside of his memory. This is hurtful to watch, Thomas."

"Please, I..."

"It's trust that you killed," he said - observed my flinch - and gestured wildly towards the glass. I'd made him a martini from what we had downstairs. "mix me another, the one with the schnapps. This one's too watery. That was the only halfway decent drink I've had since all of that happened. I think I'll go on a walk after."

"Not with those drinks in you. You're talking crazy."

"I'm _not_ talking crazy. Nothing's crazy about a little walk around the streets of Paris. You can stay here or fuck off to the club or whatever, I don't care. I'm going on a walk. Either that or kill myself."

"Laurent!"

"Laurent _nothing!_ " he shouted. He took hold of his glass and glared up at me.

"Pour me another. All I want to be is drunk. So much that I can't walk home and you'll have to pay for a taxi," Then he shoved his drink into my hand, making some of it splash over the edge and drip onto the carpet. "never mind tonight, because I sure as hell won't be going. Fuck the _Silencio_. Fuck the DJs and the booze and the whores and every single goddamn thing you and the lot of them ever stood for. Is that where you pop your pills now? So you can break up another family or five? Pour me another, you son of a bitch!"

That was too much. I am not proud to admit it - but before I knew it my arm was raised, and I slapped him hard around the face.

His head jerked sharply back and his hand flew up to his cheek, where the skin was already reddened.

I hadn't meant to hit him that hard - I hadn't meant to _hit him_ , full stop - and I regretted it the moment I felt the contact. The glass dropped from my hand and rolled on the floor, not breaking, but all the liquid in it spilling on the floor; aghast, I stared down at my hand, then at Laurent, fully expecting him to hit me back.

But he did no such thing. Nor did he retaliate at all. Instead he looked up at me for a long time, tears slowly filling his eyes. He didn't look away from me even as they spilled and ran down his cheeks, and he didn't make a single sound. Only when I sank down to my knees did he finally bury his face in his hands, crying wildly as I've never seen him cry before, not even during the day of the funeral. Like a child who'd lost the way home.

...

I reached out and held him as we cried together; once he tried to push me away, weakly, but gave in and fell against my chest. All the while he sobbed 'he's dead, he's dead, he's fucking _dead_ ' over and over, those words hammered into the depths of my heart, and even though I wanted to tell him to be quiet I hadn't the presence of mind to do so. I don't even think I said anything at all. I just cried. And when we ran out of tears, or at least thought we had, we simply sat there leaning limply against each other until the sun set and darkness seeped in.

...

I did pour him another schnapps with amaretto, hours after he first asked for it, but he left it unfinished after only a sip. He was intent on walking back, so I didn't insist, either; with a mumbled utterance that he'd call me sometime soon, he sniffed, wiped his eyes with the back of his hand, and stumbled out into the night. I watched him go for the longest time, seeing him eventually stand straight and cross the road with a much-welcomed wariness in his eyes, before I even backed into the doorway.

When he was gone I took a sip and winced; Laurent had wept into it during the short time he'd held the glass in his hands, and it tasted like it. But I stood there and drank down all of it anyway, because I couldn't bear to see the liquor go down the drain - specifically, the schnapps part. Every single drop of it belonged and was dedicated to you. Only when I put the glass down did the salt get in my eyes.

Schnapps, amaretto, and tears.

**12 February**

Sometimes, very, very briefly - a blank moment - numbness - _forgetfulness._  
The occupation of something else forcing you out of my mind completely.  
It frightens me.

**12 February**

there are parisian mornings and afternoons so blue and sad  
underneath my feet the earth revolves as chaotic as my mourning

**13 February**

Not looking forward to tomorrow. Nevertheless I do want to go out.

Maybe I'll take a look in the shops...

I always loved shopping more for being able to talk to you, being able to hold your hand, having non-shopping related conversations wherever we walked. I can still do my half, though, can't I? I'll tell you about it when I come back, if I find anything interesting.

**13 February**

No news from Laurent yet. I'm getting worried.

**14 February**

Sad afternoon. Shopping. Bought a pair of headphones (frivolous) that I haven't unpacked. Thought about sitting down for a meal in our usual café, but in the end stopped only for a tea-cake in a bakery I've never been in. Taking care of the customer ahead of me, the girl behind the counter said _voilà._

The expression I used whenever I brought you something, or lifted up a new record from the turntable, whenever you slept over at my place and I wanted to wake you in the morning with buttered croissants and coffee. The very last thing I remember you telling me is you pulling me out into the snow-covered pavement, free from the noise of the club, gesturing to the frosty night outside as you whispered, faintly, _voilà._

 _Voilà. I am here._ Affirmation of existence.

That word brought tears to my eyes and my voice shook as I placed my order.  
Back in my dark, silent home I sank down on my bed and carried on crying for a good long while.

(I would have liked to visit you but that one word took all the strength I had out of me.)

**16 February**

Last night, for the first time, dreamed of you.  
Your fingers trembled in the light overhead, pale and delicate under the sodium streetlight, the lighter in your hand clicking rapidly as you tried to flick it and missed every attempt - -

**18 February**

February is the cruellest month, so many dates to dread in such a short period of time.  
Your birthday, one month since you left this earth, one month since you returned to earth, all in this _one month_.

No one shall call me tonight, I want to be alone, I have no energy to even ignore phone calls.

**19 February**

Sad start to another day. Over breakfast Papa told me off for tugging the phone cord out - _he_ was waiting for a business call.

It was only a gentle admonishing, and he stopped as soon as I ducked my head and nodded. I don't doubt that he knew _why_ I did it, and that he understood how raw my grief is still - but I acted without regard to other family members, and that simply needed telling. Even in deep sadness there are boundaries to be kept.

Poor Papa, poor Maman; they seem to have withered with me during the past month, the lines around his face are deeper and she is more sadly quiet than ever. Maman still talks to _your_ Maman, by the way, I sometimes hear her while I'm upstairs, quietly engaged in chatter that is simultaneously gentle and therapeutic (I hope). She never pries and she never talks about the incident, but she never seems to pretend that it didn't happen or that things have stayed the same. No denial from her part; she is too much of an adult. I have a long way to go.

**20 February**

Laurent called.

Nothing much was said. But ten days of silence is longer than any we have endured from each other since we became friends, and he seemed to think that that was punishment enough for the time being. He simply asked me how I was doing and if I was not too sad, though I don't think he was listening too closely to my answer. (I am doing as well as I can manage, which is to say, while I remain endlessly sad.) More a question of formality.

In-class topic today: psycholinguistics.

**22 February**

'Thomas Bangalter suffers from the death of another human being,'  
(A slow approach to reach the _literal_ fact - to be continued.)

**24 February**

_Damnant quod non intellegunt._

**24 February**

_You make this all go away...  
... I just want something I can never have._

NIN, was it? - Promising.

**25 February**

I just realized that I never told you anything about what happened to that assignment, the one I finished on the fifth. It's not that there was a lot to say about it - I got a good grade for something I spent so little genuine effort on, and that's the end of that tale - but the fact that it took me this long to realize that should tip you off to what I've been doing, in regard to this diary. This is the first time I have read it over from the start.

Verdict? Not happy with it, that is to say, not very happy with myself. But that's to be expected.

And that re-examination was spurred on in the first place because of the date. Notice that it is the twenty-fifth; a full month since the funeral, before you were irrevocably returned to dust, and I had to begin walking my own path. So far what I have crafted/written of it displeases me greatly and I'm not sure when I will get better, nor if I indeed will.

But you'd have wanted me to persevere and I shall (bad faith).

**28 February**

Goodbye, wretched month!  
How glad I am that this is not a leap year, that I do not have to endure the extra twenty-four hours - your miserable offspring!

\-----

**01 March**

Today I spent an unhealthy amount of time sitting on a bench in the university gardens, staring intently at the ground.

I'm sure it was unhealthy, I missed a lecture to do so, and I felt concerned - _nervous?_ \- gazes pass my way every now and then. I was very painfully aware of all of that. But I couldn't look away. My focus was not on how neatly the grass was trimmed (very nice) or how the flowers were just about beginning to bud and bloom (very pretty), but more of what lay beneath it all. Paris is a city literally built _upon_ the dead, over six million resting in the _commonly_ toured lengths of the catacombs alone. Who knows how many more there must be amidst the fallen-in ceilings, blocked walls, and the illegal condos and cinemas built within? I could not imagine willingly walking into that cold earth, even if that space was adapted with familiar comforts; certain values that I possess have made it difficult for me to imagine disturbing so many of the dead.

And if not that underground labyrinth, the graveyards, overflowing with people three hundred years ago - hardly better now. Underneath the modern, stylish serenity of _Place Joachim-du-Bellay_ , the very heart of Paris, lies the forgotten remains of those who never made it into the catacombs. For centuries they lay there, bodies melting into fat, fragile bones crumbling, disease melded in every...

Pardon me. This is slowly becoming _spectacle_. I'll stop.

But the point remains that these times are gone, safely buried underground, where no one ever thinks of them - except when a close one has passed away. Then comes the inevitable funerary rituals, considerations that leave everyone shaking their heads and throwing their hands up in frustration, eager to be done with such things and never think of them again. (But this is the desire of an immortal; these people too will one day die and leave that burden of sorrow behind.) All that and more are the reasons why you cannot be found in any of the inner-Paris cemeteries. Your grave is a longer ride away, though it's still not _terribly_ far. Only far enough away that sometimes I forget that you are there at all - out of sight and out of mind, as ashamed as I am to admit it. Since the funeral I have not been there.

It's not that I don't know the way. I know that I should go. I _want_ to go.  
... I just don't know when, and how I'd react if I saw you again.

(But I also insist on going alone. Complications.)

**01 March**

My sunset is slow and my first star is pain, still the darkness will not come.  
The evening spreads blood-red over Paris. Sometimes it does that, of course, due to the sun. I remember you used to watch the sky whenever this occurred; _you_ found it quite exquisite. Imagine me, closing all the curtains and hiding from beauty essential to your memory, because it reminds me of quite something else.

I do not even dare to reproach myself tonight; shouted into this cold, empty darkness, it would have but a disgusting echo.

Another note: I have finished all the schnapps. They helped, even just a little. In the end they were yours, so - thank you.

**03 March**

(in a state of deep confusion)

Surely you were more than just a friend to me. For quite some months it was as if you were my lover, joined in every possible sense of the word in both mind and body. When you left me it was as if I had lost half, no, more than half, of myself; at some point I no longer belonged wholly to myself, you took it all.

But I never told you any of this. I will never know what you'd have felt about it. Maybe you'd have been flattered and change the subject to something else (polite rejection); perhaps you would have been disgusted (the end of us); but perhaps you would have reciprocated with grace. I don't know, the odds never looked too good.

I constantly fear that you yourself wouldn't want to accept my mourning as valid.

**04 March**

People tell you to be brave, wish you a firm _bon courage_ wherever you go. I hate that word: _courage!_  
That word is abrasive from the start, clawing its way from the throat, the harsh guttural 'r' tearing free, finishing with a lingering, rigid snarl. Besides, the time has passed for any and all mentions of courage. Courage is seeing your friend gulp down whatever pill they can score in a darkened nightclub, so dark that no shape nor colour can be distinguished, and saving your own outburst of rage until you've confirmed if things are going to be all right or not. Courage is taking care of him when he is drunk, when he is sick and suffering, concealing your faraway stares and sighs all the while so that he will not worry. Courage is being able to put another before yourself in the face of peril. Constantly one makes a decision and puts on a mask for the sake of a loved one - that, _that_ is courage!

But what use is that now, when there is no such _one?_

When people pat my back and tell me to have courage now, they really mean the _will to live._  
And no one can force that. That is no one's business but mine.

**06 March**

Nightmare, on the verge of tears even as I write: I lose you again. I am overwhelmed. Even when I close my eyes the scene lingers as clear as day, dancing behind my eyelids - the crash, the sirens, me lying in the snow, crying out your name out over and over to where neither words nor love can go.

**11 March**

It is half past nine and I am still in my room. All classes have been cancelled.  
Snow, a real snowstorm over Paris. Bizarre at this time of the year!

... so I tell myself and suffer for it. You will never be here to see it again, nor can I describe it to you aloud.

**13 March**

How strange it is, how strange; that your voice that I heard every day and knew so well, and which was the very texture of my memory, I can no longer hear. You are with me like a faint echo only, localized somewhere in the back of my head, but no longer immediately recognizable.

But that is far from the only thing gone from me. I am becoming emptied out; I lose the memory of your voice, your laughter, the reassuring brush of your sleeve against mine. Every now and then something is taken away and I notice only when it is too late. Sometimes you want everything, you demand of me a total seclusion from the outside world so that I can mourn you (but then that is not you, it is I who burden your memory with that request); other times (being truly yourself) you come to me and offer me light and a small, loving warmth, your quiet breath caressing my cheek, whispering _go out, go on, Thomas, have fun, it's all right to laugh every once in a while_. And because I am never convinced of your sincerity until I hear that murmur in my ear, the idea of not being able to hear your voice is slow torture. For if I could not be exposed to your voice ever again, how could I remember it after a while, and if I could not remember it, how would I tell you apart from the demons?

 _Mon dieu!_ Am I falling into the angels-on-the-shoulder rhetoric out of all things?

As a child I could not understand what was it that germinated philosophy, only that those things hurt and (largely) happened to other people, and I was not old enough to even think of coming to terms with them. Over a decade later I have been forced to hurt and become one of those 'other people'; though I have grown and would not be able to recognize my childhood self (nor my childhood self me), I still remain the entity known as Thomas Bangalter, so like a child I gaze into the sky and question why night with stars, and then night without end.

**14 March**

An onset of grief. I cried.

**18 March**

Review with professor, who knows about my circumstances. He is kind but not as kind as I would like. Left the room feeling guilty and embarrassed because I felt as if my mourning is inauthentic, a mere weakness to emotion, and that I should be on my way to - how I hate the term - 'getting over it'. So to speak. A part of me is flushed with indignity, another withering silently in surrender.

It was far from his right to speak to me in this way, none of his business; but have I not made my grief everyone's business enough already? Is this just retribution?

**18 March**

hearing a voice  
or catching a smile;  
turning away from the mirror.

you bastard  
how dare you leave me like this?

...

(i can't think of seven more.)

**19 March**

Difficult thoughts, _second_ thoughts, feeling a sense of intense abandon.

Bill Withers came on the radio; your favourite song. Sank down onto the floor. Didn't cry, but something broke inside.

Pardon me. I cannot write more tonight.

**20 March**

Today I found a picture of you slotted between the pages of my old maths textbook.

My breath caught in my throat. But only for a moment, and besides, _missing you_ isn't the point of this entry. For once. No, I gained a _realization_ from looking at it, and it was something far greater than anything I've learnt on my own since your leaving; it's _that_ I want to share. It will provide excellent justification for the thing I've wanted to tell you for quite some time now. The photo is over a year old, so there is a chance you might not remember what it was - let me describe it first.

This photo is oriented vertically. Portrait, if you prefer that term. You're the only person in it. You're wearing pale trousers and a dark gold-edged Fred Perry polo shirt, the one you wore all the time. Or maybe you had several of the exact same, I don't know. That shirt was a part of you the moment you left Carnot; you wore it to clubs; you wore it to our gigs and our friends' gigs; you wore it when you died; in that coffin you are presumably still wearing it, or a replacement of some kind. By virtue of that I can't stand Fred Perry shirts anymore, but no matter. The weather is bright and your eyes are halfway shut to protect them from the sun. There's a chain bracelet on your wrist, thankfully angled away from the camera so that I don't need to revisit the sight of it broken and dangling useless between your limp reddened hand, and a cigarette is poised delicately between your fingers. You have lovely long loose hair. There's a smirk on your pink lips, so daring yet so cute, in that bullshit sort of way I've only recently been able to recognize. Once that look inspired in me a sense of awe, and a quickening heartbeat that always took a while to calm.

Now? The more I stare at you, the more you appall me.

Look at you. Look at this _image._  
Carefree and careless. Proud-looking, as if you hadn't spent the past year being squashed between pages of Galois and unsolved quartic equations. Hardly dignified, if I may say so. You are so utterly _unaware_ of what's going to happen to you at the start of this year that it makes me furious. I can barely see your eyes, but in what little sunlight hits them, it is as if you were unstoppable against the world while you positively _marinated_ in that foolish charming naivety of yours. You gaze sideways towards me as if you had some sordid unfinished business and all the intention to take care of it, which is, in the end, a mere mockery of your current state. You look at me as if I owe you money. It's disgusting.

You have no right to look so timelessly happy, when I'm so miserable.

But even then, the bullshit is completely subjective. I didn't feel that way months, weeks or even days ago. Maybe tomorrow I'll think I was just having a crazy episode and nothing more. That's why it's so important for me to stress the actual purpose of this entry: I'm focusing on the conclusion that I gained from looking at that photo today, not the photo itself. When I gazed into your smile, and felt the pain that this mere image of you caused me, with it came a deeper, more dreadful feeling - that while many others still love me, from now on my death would kill no one.

Think about it. Papa and Maman have each other, they're best understood as one unit with the strength of several persons. I'm sure my sole death wouldn't be able to bring them down. Laurent? He blames me and wouldn't waste tears for me at this present moment, of that I'm sure. Your family? They won't miss me. Maybe they'd even be glad, as horrible it is for me to say it; I have never thought your family hostile or resentful. But I also feel that from their perspective, my death completes some kind of _equilibrium_ , restoring a balance to their world and enabling them to move on at last.

(I don't think that's the only way that they can be at peace, and I don't think they _hope_ for my death.)

(But it would be a viable method.)

And thinking about this scares me; the fact that I have no one who would be torn apart so viciously when I am dead. I suspect that if I had gone first, you would have been this person, though I don't know whether you would have resented me for going. But that's not what happened. Neither of us banked on leaving before the other, or even leaving so suddenly and without closure.

...

And that isn't fair to me, you know?

...

That simply isn't fair.

...

Maman told me last month that I ought to stop writing to you. She said it wasn't healthy. I ignored her at the time, but now I see the truth in her words; you are gone and I am not. We occupy different worlds now. Things aren't the same. I can still spill my heart out to you in words - I can apologize endlessly, shout, rage at you at the same time as I'm taking my anger out on hapless objects around me - but you are no longer capable of responding, and it's ridiculous of me to expect you to do so. I mean, that's what I've been doing these past couple of months. Nothing has come of it.

There is nothing to be gained from this exercise.

Which finally brings me to this conclusion: I'm done. I shan't write in here any more. I'll treasure this diary as long as I live, and deep inside me there will always be an emptiness where you used to be; as far as I know, it is not a void that can be filled, and I shan't attempt to fill it either.

But I can pull myself together into another coherent whole. So that's what I'm going to do.  
I'm sorry.  But I have to forget you to move on.

 _Adieu, adieu._ Please forgive me.

_Yours entirely, once upon a time,  
T. B._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [ **EDIT:** As of 12/Aug/2015 the notes have been moved to [their own 'chapter' at the end](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4334822/chapters/10380342).  
>  For the first part, ' _Mourning Becomes Sisyphus_ ':
> 
> \- the entries of 27 and 29 January,  
> \- the entries of 03, 08 and 24 February,  
> \- and the entries of 01, 04, 18 and 30 March were given notes.]
> 
> This is a difficult story to write, physically and emotionally, and is partially an attempt at healing my own losses.  
> Please comment or [send me a message about it](http://kimbk.tumblr.com/ask), if you liked it. It means a great deal to me. Thank you so much.


	2. Spoken to the Evening

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **There are trigger warnings for this chapter.**  
>  You may want to be cautious about the 20th May entry - there are mentions of drug use, needles, and some graphic violence. I would not call that scene _mild_. Please be cautious.
> 
> Much thanks to my betareaders, one whom I asked to beta this part specifically. I think I will be thanking four people in all by the end.

**All I Was Doing Was Breathing (Part 02) -** _'Spoken to the Evening'_

**\--------------------**

**17 April**

...

Hey.

It's me again.

**17 April**

I'm sorry for what I said a month ago. I really am. I was so sad and angry with myself and...

...

Enough self-pity. I don't deserve it.  
The truth is, I was... I was _frightened_ of continuing this diary, for the fear of making some overblown literature out of it. Sure literature thrives best on truths like those, and on loss and sorrow and all it connotes, but there was no reason why this loss should have resulted in any such thing. There was no art in what happened to you; the very thought horrifies me. No art is so unobtainable, so unspeakably beautiful, that it _justified_ losing you for it.

But I'm back now. My fear was overcome. I am not a good enough writer, nor egoistic enough to _want_ to make art out of this, and no one else will see it anyway; if I am to cope with my feelings properly I ought to stop thinking of them as pretentious, unjustified, or some other inauthentic device. I'll carry on.

**17 April**

Just thought I ought to tell you that.

**18 April**

I saw your brother today.

Both of us have lost weight, it seems. He was wearing his hair long, like you did, and when I saw him he was wearing an old white Primal Scream shirt. You remember, the long-sleeved one you had? The one you saved only for special occasions and concerts. In fact that's why I saw him to begin with. That familiar, yet uncommon flash of white caught my eye while I was coming out of the butcher's - I turned - and there he was.

(I don't think he saw me.)

I confess that the very first emotion I felt upon seeing him was a kind of mild _outrage_ that he should be wearing something of yours. But then I thought: well, why _shouldn't_ he? You and I swapped clothes sometimes, too - you and he must have done so far more often - and that was when you were still here. Even then you were generous with most of your clothing; there was no real reason to protest the fact that he was wearing that shirt. At least he gave it an owner again.  
Besides he wasn't wearing that shirt as if he felt himself _entitled_ to it - no, he walked carefully along that pavement with a plastic bag (groceries?) in hand, slower than his usual pace, edging around everyone who came too close. The last time I saw him, which was at the funeral, something had been gone from him; I saw him depart today and knew that whatever it was remained acutely gone, but even so, he was taking care not to ruin that shirt.

I can't confirm this, but if he has been more graceful with his mourning than I have been - I wouldn't doubt it.  
He carried himself like he had _purpose_ , though his usual sprightly walk had slowed, and he didn't look happy.

...

A part of me was tempted to stop him and talk to him - say hello - but a tidal wave of guilt washed over me the moment I thought of him turning around to face me, and I realized that I had no idea what kind of expression he would regard me with. So in the end I let myself lose him in the crowd. Maybe he blames me. No, not maybe - almost _definitely._ I didn't think I would be able to handle that.  
I'm not sure when I will be; perhaps never, even though I know you would call me cowardly for admitting to this.

**19 April**

Spurred by the almost-encounter yesterday I tried calling your house.  
They really haven't changed the answering machine message. Hung up in tears.

**20 April**

Violent outburst. Went out to dine with family; the waiter came around with a large plate after we placed our order and the wine had been poured, he set it down and exclaimed: _amuse-bouches._  
You'd sometimes say you would cook for me, then return bearing only a plate of delectable but tiny snacks, nowhere near enough to fill me up. Just to tease me. I used to find that anywhere from amusing to totally infuriating, but the point is you used to announce yourself and those snacks with that exact same phrase and I startled so bad that I tipped over my glass, and then when it was cleaned up I had to excuse myself to the bathroom, and there I sat and cried and cried until the person in the stall next to mine knocked and asked if I was all right.

Do I sound like I'm all right, I asked right back. Then there was nothing.

Awful. Couldn't finish the meal either. There was a metallic, salt taste in my mouth all the time.

**20 April**

I have to stop using this one word.

Don't say that I am _mourning_. That word is too psychoanalytic, and we all know that psychoanalysis isn't real.  
I'm not _mourning_. I'm suffering.

**21 April**

Stupid.

Listening to Glenn Gould playing Bach. The records from 1963-65 in a row.  
Under his fingers the clavier is exquisitely well-tempered. I hear them herald the sixteenth fugue, your most beloved, then my heart is filled with a terrible sadness and I bury my head in my hands to cry.

When are my tears going to dry up, when is this going to stop hurting?

**22 April**

_rêve_  
_sans fin_  
_ni trêve_  
_à rien_

**25 April**

~~I promise to visit in the next week or two. I _will_ visit. I will.~~

**25 April**

Mourning has made the act of _shared enjoyment_ very difficult. I wasn't here to tell you about it, but returning, briefly, to around three weeks ago; the first of April. I had hoped, faintly, that for that one day some semblance of normality might resume. If we couldn't be light-hearted that day, when else? I even went out that night with some people from class, just for the sake of it. But it appears that I've been too blatant in my sorrow; all day and night I received not a single absurd jest nor a _poisson d'avril_ , nor attempts to pin one to me, even though I usually get plenty of both.

I think they did this to not upset me, but really, I just became more sad.  
How fast one becomes _that person_ , the killjoy in every party, all from the natural act of grief...

**26 April**

'Thomas Bangalter suffers from his death.'

**27 April**

Reminder:  
Groceries: candied peel/pistachios/lemons (x2)/mascarpone/chocolate (dark)/two white roses from the garden  
Resume reading _Les Thanatonautes._

**29 April**

Maman baked a cake today. I helped, briefly brought out of my mood by this mystery having been solved. Admittedly that last reminder for groceries baffled me even as I was writing them down, once I got to the roses I couldn't fathom what could be made with those. But the roses were mostly for decoration - far more innocuous than I thought.

First she ground the pistachios, then mixed them with breadcrumbs, sugar, baking powder, oil and eggs. This mixture she then baked to produce two delicate sponges, which she left to cool before making the filling: ricotta and mascarpone beat together with icing sugar, lemon zest, candied peel, lemon juice, chocolate and some leftover pistachios. (I licked off what was left behind in the bowl after.) It was a splendid two-tier cake, dusted with sugar and whole rose petals, light and soft-looking like spring.

But why do I detail this? You know this already. It was a favourite cake of yours whenever you came around.

I helped her shell the pistachios, spread the filling on the cake, and cleaned up afterwards. Despite knowing that this was a cake you liked - I do think this was partly why she made it, she misses you though probably not as intensely as I do - we spoke nothing of this, and because of it we were able to work in comfortable silence. I felt okay for the first time in a while.

When I finally left to go upstairs she cut a slice from the cake and gave it to me on a plate. I would have eaten it the moment I was sat down and settled, if not for nostalgia hitting me at that very moment. Why it couldn't have come earlier, I don't know. I closed the door behind me - sat down on my bed - and just looked at the cake for a long time, admiring its softness, imagining its taste. When I held my hand over it I could almost swear that it was _still_ warm from the oven, though that was surely impossible (the filling wouldn't have held up otherwise), and then my thoughts drifted to you again. I naively wondered what angels eat or if they eat at all (childish concerns really) and felt rather sad that you weren't here to enjoy this with me.

But I wanted you to look at it, anyway. I wanted you to know that this cake was made for you, anyway.  
I wanted to believe that you were _watching_.

So in the end I left the cake on my desk, this diary set next to it, and withdrew for a few hours' nap. I wanted you to enjoy it first, in whatever way you could. One may call it a variation on shamanistic offering, if they were so cynical; honestly speaking, though, I think such an attitude is not far off the mark. There are countries where they still offer a feast to their ancestors or loved ones long since gone, and keep a respectful silence for the needed period, before partaking in the feast themselves as a shared ritual. To think that the dead can enjoy the taste of food, or that they can resent, or that they inhibit certain places to watch over their family - such things are not _myths_ or _superstitions_. They are a way of understanding the differences between the living and the dead before reconciling both worlds into a natural whole; everyone is connected, everyone dies, and this is neither something to fear nor treat with disdain.

Easier said than done, but today I wanted to believe.

I woke up feeling well rested and relatively peaceful. Short-lived, I'm sure, but it was a nice feeling.  
The cake was still moist and soft when I finally dug my fork in.

\-----

**01 May**

I am either lacerated  
or unnerved

and occasionally subject to gusts of life

**03 May**

I went back to your grave today.

I was carrying a fresh bundle of red roses with me. But when I got there I saw two sets of flowers from your family, probably no more than a few hours old themselves, already lying atop your grave. One was a full basket of lily, rose and chrysanthemum; one was a carnation wreath woven through with irises.

They looked beautiful. Pure, soft, just the right amount of melancholy. I didn't think that they were you - the realm of the florist couldn't be further away from yours, I remember your blindness to the language of flowers ever so clearly - but they were put together with the utmost care, and weren't out of place at all. I can only imagine what they would have thought and said to you as they laid those flowers down.

I wondered which one was your brother's. One seemed to be from your parents and one from him, but there was no note nor letter attached to either, so I couldn't tell. I was careful to not dislodge the flowers as I sat down in place and gazed at your headstone for a very long time.

My poor friend - did you ever imagine that this would be your fate, lying here smothered in flowers as white as the falling snow? Spring has come and yet where you lie it feels as if the past season has never gone at all. You took your leave in winter, but at the same time you have held it fast here upon this small grave, as if you would remain tethered to earth if you clung on.

I stayed there until the breeze became too chilly, then I left. Three hours exactly by the time I caught the train.

**03 May**

I went home with my bouquet, by the way.  
I said above that the flowers already on your grave wouldn't have been your thing, but neither were mine. No, they aren't even half as good as your family's tributes - my roses are _selfish_. These roses are a manifestation of my feelings _towards_ you, guilt and adoration and all it connotes, rather than anything you'd have genuinely liked for yourself. The flowers you liked were few but I actually know them; there's no excuse.

I did leave _one_ rose for you. It's nestled between the other flowers, out of sight but occupying some significant spot. I'm coming back as soon as I can, and I'll have a properly thought-out bouquet then, I promise.

Please still like me.

**04 May**

Reminder:  
Exam 9am-12pm in usual hall, 9th May.  
Exam 9am-12pm in Room 12F, 10th May.  
Exam 2:30pm-4:30pm in Room 34GD, 13th May.  
Exam 9am-11am in Room 12F, 15th May.  
Library opening hours extended, from 8am-10pm to 6am-midnight, make use of this.  
Meet up with friends, 15th May.  
_Le Monde_ for Maman. (I will read after.)  
Groceries: _Boule_ /apples/avocado (x3)/aubergine/eggplants/shrimp (shells on)/milk/jam/chocolate.

**05 May**

Outing with Maman.

It begins with a trip to buy a new butter dish. Do we go for a standard butter dish with a lid on, or shall we be adventurous and choose a _cloche à beurre?_ Porcelain, bone china, stoneware, glass, or stainless steel? This visit soon turns into a hour-long browsing of the cookery shop, and even though we leave without the butter dish (or even a consensus as to what the dish should be made of), we are in good spirits and decide that we don't want to go back home just yet. So we head to a nearby restaurant for lunch; omelette for me, onion soup for her. We sit outdoors. The rest of Paris drifts busily around us as we eat. For dessert I take a sip of sweet icy coffee, look at her across the table as the warm spring breeze caresses my hair, and just for a moment I can pretend that I have found some peace.

 _Are you having a good time,_ she asks.  
_Yes,_ I answer. _I liked looking around - the food's good, and it's nice weather._  
_You look happier than you've seemed in ages_ , she says, and pauses. _Are you still writing to him, she asks._  
_Yes_ , I reply. She gives me a long look and I realize for the first time how much she looks her age. Maman has always looked five or four years younger than she truly was. The past four months has aged her more thoroughly than two decades of raising me, and I hardly claim to have been an easy-going child.

 _Not that I want to stop you now,_ she asks, listlessly reaching for the sugar cubes, _but why._

...

I look away. Faintly, from the inside of the restaurant, a _lieder_ broadcast over the sound system - how sad!  
But why, that is the question, though she made it sound like a statement and not an inquiry. From that I make the selfish assumption that she 'asked' more out of exhaustion than of a genuine need to know, and that I am not in any way obliged to provide an answer. For there is no utility in it. It is a long and complicated answer with a simple essence of four words, but those words carry with them a tragic gravity that I myself have not begun to puzzle out. This answer will have consequences that I am not yet prepared to face.

(The four words in question: _because I loved him_.)

 _Does it matter?_ is my eventual answer. We don't speak again for the remainder of our stay; I make no attempt to explain because I don't feel that she will understand. I don't think that she would be _unwilling to accept_ the fact I could be in love with another man; that is not what I mean. What I fear she will not understand is the _process_ by which all of this occurred, because in full honesty, there was no special or notable reason why I fell for you. The after-school walks, taking the long way around, sharing soda during lunch, the way you scolded me or praised me (sometimes within minutes of each other), the world-weary look in your eyes, seeing your date casually take your arm, all the records and the cigarette smoke and the flashing neon lights and your sacrifice and the memories of a lost love that never really existed...

...

Never mind.  
It was all done for anyway.

...

...

She speaks my name and someone else has died.

**08 May**

_Victoire_. First without you in a very long time.  
Made myself a potato gratin with cream and slowly ate it over the course of the day. Opened a red wine to go with it and have been downing it ever since. Dessert is maybe blueberries if I'm still conscious by then. The colours of freedom.

(Absurd.)

(It was your presence that stopped me structuring my life around such ridiculous rituals.)

**09 May**

I may be absent for a few days as I finish up my exams.  
Please forgive me this, as well as all you can forgive; I can't ask you for much more in good faith.

**13 May**

This is the way I grasp my agony.  
Not directly in solitude - not empirically etc., - granted, I have not been graceful in my suffering, so everyone generally knows how in pain I must be when I am out and about. But at least I have control enough to not show it overmuch most of the time, certainly not enough to merit worried questions. But it comes over me when my love for you is torn to pieces once again, just when I was thinking that there was nothing left there to tear, the most painful point at the most abstract moment...

**15 May**

I should not have come to this meet-up.

Today I had my final exam, so I was already mentally exhausted as it was. This was a meeting with some friends from Carnot whom I hadn't seen in a long time; they had all heard the news about you, and wished to give their condolences, though that was not the initial point of the night. I had expected some quiet words of comfort and a simple evening spent all together - Laurent was there too, he was my support for the night - and if the mood was right I'd even have liked a round of fond reminiscence. Because despite it all, grieving over you _is_ difficult; because I _do_ wish to get better at some point, and who better than others to help me through it? There is no shame in admitting that you can't go through this on your own. But then I began to hear this kind of talk:

"The world is poorer for his loss..."  
"Yes, yes..."  
"He had all his life ahead of him..."  
"Did I ever talk about the time I had a crush on him, it was unexpected and I thought it was so wretched at the time, but something about the way he spoke... captivating..."  
"Well, I don't mean to downplay _your_ experience, but I think we were all a little in love with him. I think it'd have been difficult not to be, not after hearing his voice or seeing him write. You all remember his handwriting, right? How he was always the one who got asked to write up announcements on the board, or the time when he did the lettering for those posters in the library?"  
"He was like art personified..."  
"I asked him out once, he turned me down... somehow coming from him, it didn't really hurt at all..."  
"He and Thomas made such a good pair together, I sometimes thought..."  
"How did he go? ... Drugs, they said?"

...

"Yes," they were all saying nodding solemnly and eagerly - an awful contradiction. "we were _all_ a little in love with him."

...

If you will pardon me for getting angry.  
They thought little of you in Carnot, regarding you as more odd and stoic-faced than likeable before the two of us became friends. When you grew up to become a dreamy-looking, beautiful teenager, then they couldn't get enough of you. Then we left school and they cared very little for keeping in touch with either of us until this happened, and now they speak of abstract _love_ as if that alone meant that their connection to you had any meaning whatsoever - while I sit here with my entire _world_ thoroughly snuffed out. This is nothing to compete over, this is no joke - this is a _life!_ I don't care what they think. _Who the fuck do they think they are?_

**15 May**

[Postscript: writing before bed, feeling calmer]

Laurent rescued me, thank God; from the look on my face he seemed to have noticed something that no one else did, and pulled me aside to ask what was wrong. My non-reply spoke volumes to him, apparently, because immediately afterwards he made an excuse to get us both out of the building. We did not speak again, nor did we look at each other, until he had settled us down in a café two blocks away. He ordered us an espresso each that neither of us drank, and only when the drink arrived did he begin to talk, albeit with a slow, almost guilty hesitation. But for ten minutes or so I could only register the world around me as a distant roar, my pulse pounding in my head, and I regretfully don't remember much of what Laurent said or what the surroundings were like. I can guess, however, and I picked up enough to briefly retell what he said:

I had feelings for you, Laurent knew that I had feelings for you, but he hadn't known just how intense those feelings were.  
He too was incensed by the talk that was going on, but he'd never expected me to be so furious.  
He was even more worried about me than ever, and he wanted to help.

He stopped there to await my response. I did not give one. I was too busy staring blankly in his direction.

"Thomas, I think you should see someone-"

"Don't," I said before he could finish. "I'm _fine_ ," I said, knowing it to be a lie. He shook his head, for I had misunderstood him.

"I think you should see someone _new,_ " was what he finally said, and we both knew as soon as he had said it what he meant. "so let's set you up on a date, Thomas. This isn't making you commit to anything, and I know you're too decent to ever hurt or _use_ someone else, regardless of how lonely you might be feeling. You're not the kind of person to lead on somebody for weeks on end. But I can't bear to see you so sad. A few dates here and there might help, you know, just being out and talking. Getting used to knowing new people."

...

I regret to admit that my first impulse to hearing this was to walk out, or to bury my head in my hands, or to throw the espresso (by then cold) in Laurent's face. It was a singular, violent, directionless impulse that faded away after one white-hot second. Then I had to start thinking, and had to concur that while the time hadn't been right, nothing Laurent had said was _bad_ advice. There probably wasn't any kind of _right time_ that he could have said this in, anyway. I'm here and you're not. Practically speaking there is nothing I can do about that fact, but I am able to make other choices. I thought about the distant future ahead of me and saw that while I mourn you intensely, I could not see myself doing this same exact thing five years on, ten years, twenty. I am appalled by that idea. I think _you_ would be appalled by that idea, you would not have wanted me to suffer for so long.

I am doing this to _heal_. And tonight, Laurent was sitting in front of me, offering me another method of going about it.  
What harm could come of it other than it not working?

"Okay," I said. "what the hell. I'll do it."

He said he'd try to set a date two weeks from now. Until then I wait.

**17 May**

Now that I have finished my exams I have more time ahead of me to read. I've just closed off the final page of _Les Thanatonautes_ ; beautiful story, but too sad for me in hindsight. What wouldn't I give to journey beyond death myself, and see what lies there! Perhaps I might even encounter...

... None of that thought, now. It is as Laurent implied. I must try to be realistic.

I must go and visit the bookshop at some point. Maybe a touch of classic wisdom, Maupassant perhaps, or Montaigne. But hopefully nothing that will take up all summer to read, like Hugo for instance.  
_Hugo!_ Who could stand to read him?

**18 May**

[On the radio, _Trois Gymnopédies_.]

Now everywhere, in the streets and in the café, I see all individuals under the same umbrella of _irrevocably having-to-die_ , that being the reason we called ourselves the _Mortals_ \- at least, according to Arendt. And yet at the same time they can be grouped underneath another state, that of _not knowing that this is so._

Aside from that contemplation - sometimes the urge to make music. I hope that is not a betrayal.

**19 May**

I have talked of betrayal immediately above this entry; despite this, it is hard not to resent you sometimes.  
I have been feeling this way for a while, but I blame our fellow _lycéens_ for lighting the fire.

With you I almost wish to revert to _vous_ ; that is a soft word, exhaled like a breeze or the faint buzz of a diligent honeybee. It is distant, it is gentle; it is _impersonal_ , skimming the surface of someone's being purely as a matter of politeness. But _tu_ , that is a hard-sounding term, tumbling off the tongue like the shot of a pistol, cutting right through to the quick. Whereas _vous_ is a mere inquisitive whisper of a breath, _tu_ is immediate, a figurative tap on the shoulder - that one denti-alveolar syllable _demands_ a response. It is unfair to me that to refer to you truly - to refer to the relationship that we had - _necessitates_ that I talk to you as if you were still here and capable of responding.

What I feel from that is not sorrow but rather a faint, shameful annoyance. Hence the resentment.

But to consciously use _vous_ is to _make_ you a stranger, instead of letting you settle into a place of acceptance - unthinkable!

**20 May**

Last night I had a dream that I was in a swimming pool. Doing my thing. Swimming. But the only thing was that the pool wasn't filled with water, or any other liquid, but it wasn't empty either. It was filled with syringes. Filled and used, tips burnt and blackened, powder stuck to it, fresh out of the pack, all kinds. Heroin needles. Not sure why anyone would go swimming in a pool filled with syringes in the first place, nor where all of those syringes came from, but there I was. No logic needed in a dream and all. My dream began with me falling, down, down, down through the darkness before the glinting needles broke my fall and pulled me into their embrace. Landing face first, I shield my face. Every stroke, every movement, intensified - pain and pleasure mingling together into a combination so unreal that I think I could chase that feeling forever and never reach it. Hundreds and thousands of sharp needlepoints stabbing through my skin at awkward angles, tearing at my skin, my flesh ripping in agony but the venom following it so beautifully numbing, I reach out towards the sky and my arm has dozens of syringes stuck in it, and when I raise my head the needles mark out a dotted line against my throat as if to say CUT HERE, and something surges in my jugular and I'm suddenly higher than I've ever been before, floating in a pool of syringes that I can't even feel, and the heavens open up and more needles shower down in me at the same time as the pool lurches and starts growing bigger and bigger. Syringes raining down from all sides and corners, straight down, impaling me directly from the top, so much that I would have been crucified a hundred times over before even the rainfall begins to dull from the sheer weight of all that metal and powder and rust pressing down upon me while the pool just gets bigger and bigger and never stops growing i am head down under completely fucking losing it, it's getting harder and harder to breathe and what little euphoria that got me going at the start is gone now replaced with complete fear and helplessness and it's only then that I realize that I'm going to die, and the realization causes me pain harsher than I have ever felt, even though by now it is not an unfamiliar guest in the abode of my soul but that's besides the point, acceptance never washes over me even as my death does and after I die no one cares nor misses me in the slightest I just disappear into the nothingness and fade to nothing and then I woke up.

**21 May**

Ever since that night I promised to never again touch another drug. It was a resolve made too late to save you, but it was something (at least I felt it to be so) and I hadn't felt much of a withdrawal the past few months. No urge to sneak out and score something, no urge to swallow a pill, nothing. The nightmare yesterday, therefore, came out of basically nowhere. Disturbing. Even now I feel the phantom prickle of the syringes upon my skin and can't help but shudder.

But it was good that I had the dream, in the end. Was offered a joint tonight, just outside a darkened bistro. The memories came flooding back in and I declined, hurriedly making my way back home. So what if they might have laughed? - I refuse to perform against your memory.

**22 May**

Dialogue with Papa:

D: Thomas.  
T: Yes, Papa.  
D: Have you practiced the piano recently? Or even played it for fun?  
T: _Fun?_  
D: (Pause) You _have_ to move on, Thomas.  
T: I know. I will. One day.  
D: I'm not saying this because I just want you to take up the piano again, or because I think you need to be working. This isn't really about the piano at all. I'm saying this because I can't bear to see you so unhappy.  
T: I need time. It's been four months. That's far less than the time I spent knowing him, and it wasn't as if he was just a _friend._  
D: There will be many more people in your life who will be more than just a friend. In time you will have to deal with the loss of them, too, or they will lose you before that. Eventually people go away, whether to follow their own path or due to factors beyond anyone's control. There is nothing you can do about that fact, Thomas. This is not something that you must let consume you.  
D: Everyone is precious to everyone else. No one should remain so hurt like this for so long.

D: You can't let it rule you forever.

(But empathy isn't _coal,_ Papa, we're hardly going to run out...)

**24 May**

Laurent's call: _would you prefer to meet a boy or girl?_  
I said the former. He sounded quietly relieved.

Date on the 29th.

**26 May**

Recipe for a basic mayonnaise:

Stir egg yolks with a wooden spoon or whisk to achieve a creamy consistency.  
Into this, slowly pour 225g of oil, whisking vigorously all the while to disperse the oil.  
Once the emulsion has been made, add 20ml of vinegar, salt, and preferred spices.

The key to good mayonnaise is temperature; the egg yolks and oil must be mixed at the same temperature.  
15C is ideal.

(If the emulsion is ruined, put in a teaspoonful of mustard and slowly whisk the oil-yolk mixture.  
This cannot be hurried. Go slowly.  
If you aren't just as (if not more) careful than the first time around, this will not work.)

**26 May**

I hate mayonnaise. I only learnt to make it because you liked it with your _frites_. The things I did for you...

... and the things you did for me.

**26 May**

(Entries above spurred on by the visuals of a patron eating _moules-frites_ next to me, in the corner café, approx. 1pm.)

**28 May**

Sad day. Was overcome with a sense of deep malaise from the very moment I awoke; no dreams, bad or otherwise, but rather a dormant _feeling_ that has forced out its release. To try to assuage the feeling I attempted to clean my room, for in the past months I have been rather negligent, only to find an artifact from years ago: the first ever mixtape you made for me. You made me others, too, but I thought I had the whole collection tucked away with my other tapes, not wrapped in tissue paper and tucked away in the bottom drawer amidst old sweaters and socks. And that wasn't the end of it. The moment I recognized the tape, I was seized with the absurd but _absolute certainty_ that you had left me a message in that mixtape. It was a ridiculous notion, because I'd listened to it when you first gave it to me, and I remembered _nothing_ of the kind. If you could record an intended message and give it to someone that easily, what would the point of a mixtape be? The very nature of a mixtape is to create something private and customized for the recipient. If whatever message you were trying to convey can't be told through the tracklist, or the content of the songs themselves, it's not a very good mixtape. But I simply couldn't shake off that conviction today, and desperate to hold onto any bit of you, especially your fading voice, I put the tape in and listened all the way through. I didn't dare skip anything, obsessed the idea that your voice might be hidden somewhere in the middle of the tape, if not the end or the beginning. Halfway in my tears started falling and they still haven't stopped, though _why_ I was crying, I wouldn't be able to explain coherently. They were not tears of sadness; they conveyed more a delayed _humiliation_. They were directed not wholly towards you, nor the loss of you, but to myself for not being able to get a grip - so much that I was resorting to grasping at years-old memories better lost to time, when the two of us were only just beginning to mean something to each other.

I scoured the tracklist for hidden messages, acrostics, acronyms, anything at all. No success.  
Your mixtape was made purely to cater to _my_ favourites, with no regard to _your_ feelings nor intentions.

And how bitterly I resent you _now_ , nearly a decade too late, for not being more selfish with me.

**29 May**

Nineteen years old / Engineering student / wearing a red plaid shirt / blond hair / 2pm at the _Le Sancerre._

**29 May**

It almost feels sordid to talk about a date I had with someone else in this diary.  
But out of some strange feeling, of what could be anything from a desire to be reassured to mild spite, I'll talk about just a little.

He looked nothing like you. I was glad for it.  
Glasses / nice wrists / well-manicured nails / short tousled hair.  
He was well-spoken but shy.  
The cheesecake I had was excellent; he only finished half of his piece.  
(Something about not liking sweet things. I was not glad about _this_.)  
The weather was nice. Lots of people milling around.  
He had no interest in music besides classical, opera, and maybe a little Baroque. Slightly problematic.  
We both enjoy Bernard Werber and Jules Verne, so that was a plus.

We were polite to each other, and the date was pleasant, speaking purely in terms of interaction. I didn't think there was more than that, though. As we were coming out of the café he asked if I wanted to meet again.  
Now on most dates I've been I could feel a connection of _some_ kind, even if purely in innocent terms, like liking the same books or having been to the same concert the previous year without knowing it. This was not one of those times. We didn't share all that many interests, and maybe it was just my mood, but even those harmless connections based on the things we _did_ have in common refused to form in my mind. So really, I wasn't very convinced... but nevertheless I agreed to another meeting, around two weeks from now, hoping that something more would come of it.

After these arrangements were made, I walked him back to his dorm. On the way back home I bought a small madeleine.

**29 May**

Sometimes after I walked you back after a sleepover I would return to my room and the bed would still be warm from us.

\-----

**02 June**

Raining. Went back to the piano for the first time in months (much to the relief of Papa).  
Beethoven, Sonata No. 32 in C-Minor; I took double the time needed but managed to play it through.

The most important composition for the piano ever written, and besides, it was better than _Moonlight._

**03 June**

Still raining. I am setting the date for my visit. I'd have liked it to be today, but if not...

_(later)_

I think it will be the ninth of June. I've called up the florist, here's hoping all goes smoothly.

On a different note - _Phantom of the Paradise_ was on TV today. Managed to watch all of it without crying, or even all that much melancholy for that matter. I think it would even be appropriate to say that you came only as an afterthought and not a dominant force for once. (A good film is a good film is a good film, Stein would have said, despite anything else.) When I came upstairs, the nostalgia of watching it with you rose up and enveloped my thoughts at last - but I felt it only as a soft caress, not a stifling grip. This is the embodiment of what I have previously described as you _offering me light_. During those times I do not feel guilt that I am forgetting you, because I know that to be untrue, but at the same time I am capable of being at peace with your memory. Those times are rare, but I believe that having those experiences outweigh the pain is the ultimate goal of healing.

... It would be nice to feel like this all the time.

**05 June**

Attempted a little Satie today, encouraged by hearing him on the radio a couple of weeks ago. Papa stayed to hear the third _Gnossienne_ as I was playing it through. He said nothing but sat there with his eyes closed for a long time even after the last note had faded. A rare compliment.

(Not that I am trying to flatter myself.)

~~It's a tactless thing to want, so I've never talked much about this, nor have I dared to _think_ much of it. But in truth - a part of my soul hopes that dealing with your loss will eventually lend it an air of _tragic maturity_ , that _je ne sais quoi_ that draws tears and soft sighs from an audience listening to a performer who has been enlightened in such a manner. Might I hope for it as a part of my growth, if all I can do to handle your absence is to _learn_ something from it, whether I want to or not?~~

(Never mind. This is just as tactless written down as it is in thought. Please forgive me.)

**08 June**

_Jeder, der fällt, hat flügel._

\- From Bachmann.

**09 June**

(I'm writing this by your grave.)

I'm sorry it took so long for me to come back. Just over a month. It took me that long to sort everything out and fulfil my promise; exams needed finishing, final assignments handed in, thinking about jobs, and all of those quite unimportant things had to be done. Then the flowers I promised needed to be bought and arranged - but here I am now. It's quiet here, lovely really, away from the heat and crowd of daytime. I've been sitting here for maybe three, four hours now.

I hope you like the flowers: sunflowers woven through with baby's breath, primroses, and a heart of red rose. You liked sunflowers, but I don't think you cared much for the mythology; here's hoping that you don't mind the fact that I do. My bouquet is the only one lying by your headstone now - the other flowers were cleared away - that, and a letter I wrote you a month ago.

It's in English. Call it a measure of secrecy. I didn't know who else would read it.  
Maybe that only makes it more likely _someone_ will, I don't know.

Before you, cemeteries were liminal zones for me, separate and to be avoided for as long as possible. I never feared them, but there wasn't an appeal in them, either. But you can get used to anything, and really, the peace offered by a cemetery is second to nothing that the rest of my life can offer. I like it here. They chose a nice spot for you - maybe it's a good thing that I can make this judgement now, it surely says something about how my pain has dulled. I might have resented that you were not closer to me a few months ago, but then I think no cemetery in inner Paris would have lived up to your beauty. Too expensive or too crowded. Here you lie undisturbed, but not isolated, and with plenty of space. The sun shines on your headstone, polished black marble with gold lettering - you might have thought it grim, we won't ever know, you left no will because you were too young and you had no _time_ \- and when I lean against it, it's comforting. Solid.

Here the universe is quiet. The breeze rustles the flowers and your headstone is warm and soothing against my back.  
A tendril of sunlight creeps down the side of my face - a ghost of your hair, brushing my cheek during the hot months.  
I do not move as the world moves around me and I can dream I am leaning against you, just one more time.

The night is summered. We're warm.

And there's nothing wrong or fake.

**10 June**

_je voudrais que mon amour meure_  
_qu'il pleure sur le cimetière_  
_et les ruelles où je vais_  
_pleurant celle qui crut m'aimer_

**13 June**

'He suffers from the death of his acquaintance.'

**15 June**

Failed date. He didn't turn up.  
But a mixed blessing in the end, because I spent a very nice few hours alone in the _Jardin du Luxembourg_ , discreetly feeding the pigeons. So in a way - not a failure at all?

**16 June**

The picture I found of you in March.  
Back then, angry and frustrated with myself, I exiled that photo back between the pages of my textbook; I didn't even have the grace to return you to where you had been for a whole year. Well, no more. I have rescued the photo and have given you a proper home. You now reside in my room, framed elegantly behind glass and black mahogany.

This was back in May. I'm sorry I am so disorganized with my recollections and my time.

Don't think that I don't hurt looking at you, still. It was just the right thing to do, and maybe one day I'll be able to accept the presence of this picture as naught but a sweet, long-gone memento. But right now, all I'm doing is dusting the frame every now and then, and saying hello and goodbye whenever I come in or leave. Sometimes I feel funny about getting naked in front of you when I take my clothes off to bathe, so during those times I gently turn the photo away from me and hope to God that you aren't offended by what glimpses you might have caught.

**18 June**

Siesta. Dream: _exactly_ your smile, all the midsummer sky contained in your eyes.  
Dream: complete; successful; memory.

**20 June**

Even now, five months later, I can still see the skidmarks on that stretch of the road.

**22 June**

There was a man I loved, a long time ago. I can no longer remember his name.

For the longest time, the thought of us as men was embarrassingly quaint to me; we got to know each other when we were still boys in every sense of the word, and when we could see us being _nothing else but that_ for a long time afterwards. He'd been twelve years old, and I a year younger, when we met. We cared about having fun, innocently enjoying each other's presence, and sneaking into cinemas to watch outdated films after school. I used to think he was odd, friendly but _odd_ , and the feeling was wholly mutual, I am sure. It wasn't until a school trip to Somme (a treat for those who finished the year with excellent grades) - when on the bus, his sleeping head came to a gentle rest upon my shoulder - that I realized that actually, one day I was going to kiss him, and ask him if I might love him forevermore.

I could never be sure whether that feeling was ever mutual on his part.  
But much to my despair, it had to be him, or it would be no one.

Even when I grew up and was forced to realize that such wants cannot always be fulfilled, nor should one expect them to be, my longing for him remained. I have often wondered whether it'd have changed anything if we had met as men first, if we had never known of each other's existence before a chance meeting in a club, or a bar, or in the library - whether we'd have shared awkward lunch dates where we tried to get to know each other over cakes and coffee, if we'd have made careful adjustments to our schedules to make time for each other's preferred activities, whether we would have come to a slow, gradual understanding of each other's quirks and foibles _before_ we accepted them. As boys we treated each other so matter-of-factly, without having the capacity to understand _why_ we had to be that way, and I think this has been a regretful consequence of what were still the happiest years of my life. I had loved and wanted him more than anything, but I never asked him that one important question - _whether he could feel the same for me_ \- even when I ought to have done.

Sometimes I look up from the breakfast table and imagine him sitting across me, and something inside me curls up and whimpers at the memory of his smiling, sleepy gaze - but that doesn't mean a thing.

That man is gone now. He has irrevocably vanished from my world, and only when I am in quite another realm altogether (sleep) do I have any chance of seeing him. Last night I was lucky enough to encounter him at his best, and for a long time we lay together, sharing each other's warmth. We undressed and held each other, though that was all. (I did not ask for much else.) Most of the time there is nothing particularly interesting happening in those dreams, but they are nevertheless lovely and I wouldn't trade them for all the other sweet dreams in the world. And last night, when I could feel my soul beginning to stir, I couldn't bear to tell the man whom I loved that he was merely a figment of my imagination so I actually bent my head and kissed him - and as the world lost its colour, I slowly woke up.

But aside from those occasional dreams, I barely ever think of the man who I'd wanted to share my life with.  
(This might be a lie, but if it is, it's not one worth bothering about.)

**23 June**

_Miserere mei, Deus._  
_Secundum magnam misericordiam tuam._  
_Et secundum multitudinem miserationum tuarum, dele iniquitatem meam._  
_Amplius lava me ab iniquitate mea, et a peccato meo munda me._  
_Quoniam iniquitatem meam ego cognosco, et peccatum meum contra me est semper._

**24 June**

Evening at the Saint-Sulpice, the strands of the _Miserere_ haunt me so. This is the place closest to that feeling.  
Every December the choir sings it here, I hope I will be able to come here to listen to it.

The Madonna gazes down at me from where I am sitting, her stony face blurred in the dim light - beautiful sculpture, with a hint of the Rococo perhaps - you'd have been known better about those things. For now I will merely describe her as beautiful (a poor substitute for the emotion).

**25 June**

Some days ago I mentioned how you could still see the marks left behind by the accident. Before that day I'd staunchly avoided going near there, but we'd had to drive past and I found myself staring at the road until the lights changed, we turned a corner and were gone.

Due to some morbid chain of thought I went back there again today, this time on foot. Same uneasiness and nauseous terror as before, but this time, I was kind of _seeking_ it. Maybe I believed that it'd be cathartic, I don't know, even if it ended up with me turning around and vomiting liberally on the pavement. (This did not happen.) The rubber skidmarks are burnt into the asphalt still - as I said - and during the half-hour I was in the area I looked around for stains of blood or a discarded shoe, despite knowing how ridiculous it would be for _those_ to have stayed around.

There was nothing of that sort left.  
I would have liked to leave flowers or carve a few words of remembrance, but I thought it best not to.  
No sign of recognition from nearby shopkeepers or passers-by either, either of me or the scene of the accident.

How fast a tragedy is forgotten, how one man's tragedy becomes a matter of no consequence to another. We are so unempathetic a species that I wonder how we ever manage to categorize tragedies at all, when they occur.

**27 June**

The _almost_ : used widely to connote 'never quite', 'just shy of', 'inferior to', 'nearly', etc.  
A _disappointment_ by definition. Dreams are the best example of the _almost_ \- I often dream about you but the you I see in them are never quite you. Sometimes I will be blissfully lost in a dream until I notice something _off_ about the situation - it is always something minor, things like the clothes you wear, something playful or casually misplaced, an off-handed remark of yours - that you in reality never would have done, said, or embodied. Even when we are close in body, I never quite see your features (but do we _see_ in dreams, or do we just _know?_ ).

I dream about you. I do not _dream you_.

The photograph of you that I rescued is another case. I shan't go into detail about it again, though I do acknowledge that the first time I described it, I was unfair to you. You were aware of yourself being photographed and adjusted your expression and posture accordingly; no matter how casual you were, what I see in there is not an authentic image. (I don't think it would have been much better had you not been aware that your picture was being taken, either. A single printed photo is never enough to capture the duration and breadth of human action. A photo of you walking, for instance, can only ever be a photo of you pausing, or readying yourself for another step, or putting your foot down, instead of you _walking._ )

I despair over this preserved, beloved face of yours nevertheless. This is far from the only photo of you that exists - but knowing that those shadows are _all there are_ , that is agonizing. You never liked being photographed all that much, anyway, and my heart breaks whenever I remind myself that every time you willingly placed yourself in front of the lens, it was with great courage and a genuine want. You did not _suppose_ yourself; in those rare times you did not _struggle_ with your image as I do with mine.

**28 June**

Exam results came in the post: passed everything, though not with exceedingly brilliant grades (not my goal anyway); approved to continue on to the next year. But before then, the holidays.

Papa woke me with the envelope around half past nine in the morning. Once we'd checked the results, and had celebrated quietly, I fell back into a brief nap until lunchtime; dreamt of you, a younger you, sitting at that well-worn school desk that was yours for over two years. The fountain pen poised in your hand, your notes aesthetically attractive, a lock of long dark hair pinned neatly behind the shell of your ear.  
You looked up at me. Our eyes met. You pressed into my palm a note, and smiled. But before I could read it, I woke up.

Lost in the state of sleepy, sweet, intensely sad longing.

**30 June**

[On the radio, Erika Köth's interpretation of Mozart, _Das Veilchen_ (lines 7-10):  
' _Ach, denkt das Veilchen, wär' ich nur die schönste Blume der Natur... ach, nur ein kleines Weilchen!_']

\-----

**01 July**

Reminder:  
Use book token from birthday - close to expiring. (Ionesco/Nin?)  
Maman asked for the kitchen to be cleaned before 6pm.  
New icing bag.  
Bird feed for garden.  
_Le Parisien_ for Papa.  
~~Another date coming up. (Cancel?)~~ (Cancelled.)

**03 July**

Dream: very brief but intense, under club lighting or a flickering white streetlight, surrounded by many faceless others.  
Your lips tightening around a cigarette, firm and pink, pouted softly even as you took it away to exhale...

Woke up aroused, painfully aching, and covered in a thin film of sweat. Chain-smoked until I could go back to sleep.

(Surprisingly, did not see the irony in this until later on.)

**04 July**

Independence Day across the ocean.

There is no particular significance to this date where I am, but nevertheless, every year I remind myself of it. I do feel some kind of musical/cultural connection to the USA: the land of the free, a young country still filled with immense potential. One day I would like to live there.

Start over, kind of.  
Where no one knows me nor my past.

Heh.

**04 July**

Though I'm not sure I quite get _their_ notion of patriotism.

I think it's different to how we think of it here. And I'd hardly call France an _unpatriotic_ country, myself.  
For the longest time I have felt that they still believe in the old adage - _dulce et decorum est pro patria mori_ \- and, well, I don't know. I just know how horrible it is to see one's best friend, among dozens of other people at death's gathering, having to be the one in the coffin. I'm not sure if there is any cause noble enough to justify so raw and brutal a pain - enough that praise for the action should be allowed to overcome the sadness of others.

...

Not even if the cause was, ultimately, to _save_ another...

...

...

oh my god  
oh my god, just...

please come back...

**06 July**

Small cities also have small places to stroll around in. But alas, Paris is not one of those cities.

If only I could get away from those people...!

**07 July**

The dreams come at me with a vengeance now.  
But it's nice, kind of.  
It's nice.

Last night's was very pleasant. I don't really remember where we were, only that it was warm and soft, and that we didn't go anywhere else. Just the two of us, lying together on what might as well have been the top of a cloud, a sun-warmed mat in a cabin by the beach, or even my own bed with the door locked and the nightlight turned on. The location isn't that important. I was with you and that was all that mattered.

What happened in it? Oh, nothing notable or anything. I wouldn't say anything _happened_ , because we remained in comfortable stasis until the very end. We were lying together, skin against skin, splayed lazily upon my bed. Specks of dust danced in the beam of sunlight located a foot away from the bed; we were in shadow, but it was hot, so we'd kicked off the covers, lying only on cool flat sheets and enjoying the faint breeze blowing in from the window. At some point I might have stroked your hair, moving to tickle slightly down your spine. At some point you might have nestled into my arms, comfortably fitting in against my chest, our legs tangled. All summer in a day when we lay naked in the shadows, more than together, unashamed and adored.

I dream of intimacy with you as if I deserved it.

...

I am never sure what to feel about dreams like those, when we are intimate together without actively _doing_ anything; the dreams are always nice in themselves, and whenever I wake up I always feel well-rested and content. But the feeling never lasts beyond the first couple of hours that I am awake. At that point the gears in my head begin turning, and I must slowly tread my way back towards that inevitable realization - that even if I _had_ confessed while you were here, your response would not have been you touching your lips to mine in that lustful display of affection (otherwise known as a kiss), but you smiling that devastatingly gentle, let-down smile before telling me with a shrug: "I don't think so, Thom, you're a _friend_."

...

So what if I was a _friend!_  
Water is wet, ice is cold - I was in _love!_  
I never would have forced you into anything, and if you hadn't wanted it - well, then, what argument would have remained? But I at least wanted to _ask._ I at least wanted to fantasize, practice asking you out in front of the mirror with the expectation that I would actually get to try it out on you - I wanted to take your hand even during the times we were silent, to run my thumb over the back of your hand, hoping that you would read the affection contained in that gesture. I might not have felt _entitled_ to be anything other than a friend to you, but being a friend didn't mean that I had no intention to try at being more.

And what if you had said yes? Can I imagine that too, right here, out loud?

I'd have wanted to jump into it straight away; you'd have wanted to give the relationship time. Give it a few days before we told other people, family first then friends - all those social rituals. We would have built up something so unbelievably lovely, and yet it'd have started from a fundamental disagreement. We'd have laughed together, held hands, sneaked out of clubs together and left our friends behind if we didn't like the music. We'd have bought balloons. Let them go, watch them spiral into the air. I'd have cooked you breakfast if you promised to cook us dinner, and vice versa. When you cried I wouldn't have been able to make many promises, nor would I have been able to say very much - I've never been good with words - but I would have held you until your tears dried, and once some measure of calm was attained, I would have sought a way to move heaven and earth to help you. We would have been just as special and just as _completely ordinary_ as any other couple out there, sharing scarves and spending all day in bed, and I would have wanted to take pictures of you, make such intense love to you that you would never look twice at anyone else, make promises that I had no intention of keeping, get into petty fights with you and leave you to walk home alone from the club, make up afterwards with days' worth of kisses, total adoration and good food to win back your heart, be upset with you when you remain stoic and stiff-lipped for days on end, have the tension culminate in a physical altercation (leading to passion) upon a half-made bed at nine in the morning, huddle in a corner smoking marijuana and have you borrow my books and never give them back and - and-

\- and it would have been _real_ , and _wonderful_ , and even if we'd broken up we would have been able to move on.

We would have been able to further our happiness.  
As is my constant refrain - _at least you would have been there._

...

So many people to love in my life, and yet I worry about just one, who will now never need me as much as I need him for a multitude of reasons too obvious yet painful to recall.

**09 July**

I saw your brother again today.  
And today he saw me, too.

We encountered each other going opposite ways, myself coming out of a bakery, him heading back towards home. (... Yours? His? The semantics have become confused.) It took me a second or two to recognize him when we came face to face, though the very moment I did so, I froze at that spot; he, on the other hand, seemed wholly unsurprised to see me, raising his hand in greeting before he came to a stop in front of me.

"It's been a long time," he said, and that was the entirety of his greeting. (I mumbled out a 'yes' that I'm not sure he heard.) "There's something I'd like to talk to you about, Thom - could you spare me a half hour? I won't keep you past that, I promise."

He sounded entirely pleasant. Yet at the same time, he wasn't _requesting_ this of me; no, it was a _demand._  
Of course I followed him - well, what else could I do? Take off and leave him standing? No, I'd known that something like this would happen at _some_ point; it'd have been naive and even somewhat disgraceful to think that I could avoid this forever. But none of that was reassuring when I was following him back to your place, unsure of what he wanted to tell me or what I would find there; the walk felt like the longest one in the world, and I began feeling sick as familiar roads and corners began to come into sight. I was fully expecting an awkward encounter between me and your parents, and maybe even a long talk about what happened, where I would be asked to recall everything about their night...

But Paul was too kind to let me suffer that way. "Don't worry," he said gently, sensing my hesitation. "they're not home."

Not a great consolation, but it immediately lifted a burden from my shoulders. I could breathe easier, though in the absence of that great worry my head went somewhat blank, and before I quite knew it we were at the front door. Paul pulled out the key; the door unlocked with a dry, lifeless click; then we were in, with me absentmindedly taking my shoes off and putting them by the door as I had done so many times before.

He asked me if I'd like a drink. I shook my head. He seemed to understand that, too.  
While he was hanging up his jacket I took a quick look around the living room. It was empty, and just as he'd said, I heard no other signs of life. We truly were alone. Somehow that room seemed barer than I remembered, I could have sworn that some of the pictures and small figurines were gone from the mantelpiece. I can't say more about this, though, because at that moment he walked past me to the stairs and gestured towards me, wanting me to follow him - to your room.

"Come in," he said, and entered without hesitation. I hovered at the doorway for a few seconds.  
How strange it was that I had never expected to see your room again, the place that was my refuge too for the better part of a decade and that which I had loved so well. How strange it was to actually be there today, seeing how your bed had been freshly made, or the freshly laundered and folded clothes set atop the pillow as if you'd come back and reclaim it, or how very little about the room had been changed - and feeling nothing for any of this, far too affected by the faint ghost of your scent. The moment I walked in, it hit me, and it hit me hard. I've always thought you smelled quite nice - you had a _darkened_ scent, a smoky-sweet and buttery kind of fragrance - but something as formless and capricious as that cannot survive for long without a body. I'd fully resigned myself to having lost that scent for ever, so to encounter it again was a strong, tearful shock to me. To hide the sight of my eyes welling up I glanced sharply at your desk, which was clean save for a thick book set in the middle of it, a purple bookmark sticking out past the halfway part-

"Hugo," Paul explained without prompt as he sat down carefully on your bed, and invited me to sit next to him. "he was reading his poetry when he died."

I could do nothing but nod, even though I was surprised enough at this to marvel silently over it. I have only read a couple of Hugo's works and found them to severely test my patience; I hadn't thought you'd be interested.  
If I'd known earlier, had been more open-minded...

...

I sat down. It was the least I owed him, and the vestiges of your scent, still heavy in the room.  
It was driving me mad, not knowing what Paul wanted to say to me, but I held my tongue and waited for as long as it took.

And eventually, after what seemed like over an hour, he spoke.

...

"You... ruined us," he said in a low voice. I closed my eyes, knowing that the dreaded moment had come, tears stinging behind my eyelids as if I had any right to be upset.

"Yes," I managed.

"When it first happened, the thought of blaming you for anything never even struck me. He wasn't someone who'd have acted without a good reason - and he especially wasn't the kind of person to jump headfirst into danger, no matter who was in trouble. So I knew that something very, _very_ bad must have happened - something nobody had any control over. It wasn't until after the funeral that the resentment began, when I realized that you no longer wanted to even look at us in the eye," he paused heavily. "but all I could do was to wait. Wait for us to meet again. Wait as long as it took to see you in person and tell you exactly what I thought of you. So many times in the past few months I've played this conversation out in my head. And every time you are so regretful and apologetic - you even seem to be suffering far more than any of us are - and every time I listen to you and I am still so angry. And now that you're here, finally here..."

He trailed off and looked towards your desk. Then back at me. The purple bookmark glittered in the sun.

"Now that you are here I find that I'm not even half as angry as I once thought I should be," he said finally.

All I could do was to nod slowly, not trusting myself to speak.  
His eyes were just as blue as yours, though brighter with emotion.

"In fact, I'm not sure if _blame_ had any part in my anger to begin with. It was your _avoidance_."

He reached out and rested his hand on my own. It was not a gesture meant to reassure as much as it was one meant to hold me steady, to prevent me from running away again.

"I wanted to hear you say _something_. Make excuses, weep, come to our arms, swear that you'd never show your face to us again, anything. Just something from you to prove that you hadn't forgotten us. I wanted the chance to _respond_ to you, even it was to tell you off profusely and give you a hug afterwards. But seeing you today... I realized that I'd thought of that as something simple, something you could have just _done_ and was obliged to do, without considering closely what this must have meant to you. _We_ didn't reach out to you either. You were suffering just as badly as us, at the very least - and if you blamed yourself, wasn't it more likely that you were struggling with that already? Instead of your silence being some kind of _deliberate_ attempt to stay away? It was an unfair thing to expect of you."

"I..."

Paul nodded, though mostly to himself. "... And in the end, is this what _he_ would have wanted? I hardly think so. He wanted you to be safe and for us to be happy, and what happened-"

"What I did," I interrupted gently. (I hope.) "I won't... I... the mistake that _I_ made shouldn't be diminished."

His face relaxed ever so slightly, and he smiled a little down at his folded hands.

"If you must insist - but then, I was going to say, that doesn't change what he wanted. We've had a lot of conversations amongst ourselves since, and it really does feel like we're healing a little, day by day. We've moved past all and any idea of _blaming_ someone. Our first impulse was right all along; in the end, it was nothing you or anything else could have predicted or intended. Sometimes things do happen because of a person, but only because they were physically there at the wrong place and time. Nothing to do with what they meant to do or not do. It doesn't mean that they deserve to bear that burden forever."

"..."

I... I didn't know what to say to that!  
What could have I said? What _should_ have I said?

"We've missed you, Thom. So, so terribly," he said - squeezed my hand - and pulled me into a tight hug. "... I lost one brother, I won't lose _two_ , you hear me...?"

...

Yes. Yes, I did.

I wrapped my arms around him and hugged him back. His head rested on my shoulder and he let out a shuddering sigh, one of both relief and sadness, sounding as if within him something had been extinguished forever. He had pointed out an essential truth: I knew you for a long time, and by definition that meant that I'd known your family for just as long. Paul was barely ten years old when I first got to know you. We all _grew up together_ in a good and honest sense, is the point I'm trying to make. And I think you'd have wanted me to look after Paul, or at least have the two of us check up on each other when times were difficult, regardless of whether you were here or not; it was something I had forgotten, or else had tried to put out of my mind, during the past months in my sorrow. We didn't cry - I think we might possibly have been too inconsolable for that - and we didn't speak, but for that moment, we understood. For the duration of that hug at least, we were connected.

But it didn't last long.  
I must have been holding him tighter and for longer than he was comfortable with, because he tensed and began to shift about as if he wanted to be let go. I hurriedly broke the embrace, and he looked down at the floor, looking rather conflicted for a second before he raised his head.

"I'm sorry," he said, and smiled sadly. "I'm not my brother."  
In that instant I knew that _he'd_ known all along, too.

My mind began to race with questions: _how long have you known, Paul, how did you even find out, oh God, did he know as well?_ And I was very close to asking all of this in rapid succession, I'll have you know, the words were at the very tip of my tongue. But I couldn't look at _that smile_ and put myself ahead of him in good faith, so all I could do was to blush, lower my head, and say:

"... I don't expect you to be."

...

I felt his hand touch my shoulder and squeeze slightly. Bidding me to look up. There were tears in his eyes then.

"Thanks," he said, and pulled me into another tight hug, this time only a brief one, but probably in the same manner as he once hugged you. Into my shoulder he murmured something else, and once the words had sunk in, the flood of regret came crashing down upon me all over again.

...

"I wish Maman and Papa always felt the same."

...

...

He gave me your Hugo, with the bookmark still in it and everything. On my way out he asked me to visit again, or write to him at least if it hurt too much for the time being - and if I had any photo albums of yours lying around my house (I do), could I send them back by post? He was mindful of my feelings to the very end.  
I had to sit down a few times on the short way back home. My eyes were so blurred with tears that I couldn't see a single step ahead of me.

I'm so sorry.

**10 July**

Doing what your brother requested; this morning, painfully returning to the photo album (one of many). Overwhelmed by one in which you, then unknown to me - a discreet, gentle little boy, are soft-faced and laughing in your mother's arms.  
I weep.  
Not even the desire to commit suicide.

But I manage to put the album in a large envelope and post it, for I have to do what was asked of me.

(Would you have been proud?)

**11 July**

To whom can I possibly pose this question and receive an honest answer -

Does being able to live without someone you loved mean that you loved them less than you thought...?

**12 July**

On one hand I did need to talk to your brother that day, it was long overdue.  
But on the other hand I am now back to square one. All else unravels. The _Liebestod_ comes on; pillow wet with tears.

**13 July**

_Wir haben die toten Augen_  
_geseh'n und vergessen nie._  
_Die Liebe währt am längsten_  
_und sie erkennt uns nie._

**15 July**

One in the morning; I can't sleep. Pacing in some kind of fervour.

**15 July**

Immediate continuation, under another subheading only for the sake of separating those events.  
I sneaked out of the house. I am now sitting in the bus shelter, using the pale streetlight beneath me to write; there's a kind of faint nausea within me and I'm fairly sure that it's from my surroundings, which are in an abstract way too familiar to the memories I have of that night. But at least I am not anxious. There are no good choices for me at the moment, I might as well choose the less painful option.

A bus stops. Two young men disembark. I wave the driver on ahead to signal that I won't be getting in, and it slowly leaves; as it passes by, a bored-looking woman sitting by the window meets my gaze, one pale hand clutching limply at her purse. The two people who left the bus take no notice of me, laughing noisily as they put their arms around their shoulders and walk away into the distance. They sound very drunk.

Sad, depressing sensation of a social stereotype.  
What comes to my mind is that you are no longer here and life - stupid, _stupid_ life - continues.

**16 July**

A night out with the film society: private showing of Jean Genet. I wouldn't have gone otherwise, because ever since that meeting in May and those awkward/failed dates I have found socializing a tedious chore. I regard it as an exercise in acting like a human being for several hours and little else; I suppose that there is a certain charm in pulling it off successfully, which results in me coming back exhausted but filled with a temporary conceit. If I don't stay up too late, I can even manage to have a good long night's sleep after such a day.

This outing was successful. I am calm for once.

Film: _Un Chant d'Amour._ Only twenty minutes long, but it left a powerful impression on me. (For the rest of the hour, we discussed the film in solemn tones while we ate the snacks someone had brought for the occasion; some stayed behind to watch _The Maids_ , a few including myself left at that point.) Neither you nor I looked anything like the people featured in it, nor was I wholly comfortable with what happened in it; but if I cannot understand that desperate longing and the agony of being barred from a loved one, who else could? I sat there, completely enthralled, a pang of pure joyous pain resonating deep inside my heart. I had not felt so intensely about a work of fiction in a long time. It was a good feeling.

How a man can conceive of such beautiful eroticism: the smoking scene through the wall, the imagined kiss, the black-and-white embrace, the garland of flowers. Inventor, lover, poet. An angel before his time.  
Saint Genet.

**18 July**

In Carnot you were in a Franco-Germanic speech club. How jealous of them I was, even then; every Thursday you would give me only the briefest of goodbyes as you grabbed your bag and ran off in the direction of the club meetings. Every Thursday they took you away from me and you never looked back.

This film society is quite well-known, but with limited membership. Suppose I mentioned belonging to it to make you jealous in turn, though it didn't work. Instead of envy, all I received from you was genuine happiness, with a small nudge and a request for film invites now and then, before you moved onto something else.

You have no idea how excited, and yet so _low_ , you made me feel that day.

**20 July**

Six months exactly since you were gone.  
As if to mark the occasion, I had a dream about you - a fond one to soothe the ache. Let me tell you about it.

A prelude first, before I move onto the dream itself. Do you remember our holiday at Ibiza? The hot salty air, the nights filled with music, our exceedingly comfortable accommodations; two suites in a fine hotel, one for _us_ and one for _them_ , hearty breakfasts every day. I remember the first drink I would have there every morning, the taste of the rich cold milk in a tall glass, to this day. Then we would make our own way to the beaches, or else the outdoor pool if we didn't feel like going that far, and spend entire days tanning and listening to music. We barely ever talked, though we moved around plenty, rolling around to make sure that we didn't get sunburnt every now and then - and buying ourselves drinks or ice cream to eat in comfortable silence. With you next to me, all other sound save for the waves and your faint breathing was drowned out, and in their place my heartbeat settled in, melding into the rhythm of the place.

Yes. Yes, I remember.

We rubbed oil and suntan cream on each other. You _sometimes_ took a long time to do this, other times you were faster, but you always took care to meticulously cover every inch of my narrow back. I was so ticklish I could barely keep still, but you were patient. I on the other hand always took my time. Your skin, smoother than mine - by the end of the first week exquisitely golden - the curve of your spine, and your lean legs (long for your height), I treasured them all.

I told you that you had a nice broad back once and you blushed wordlessly, ducking your head. Just a small memory.

I remember that your features underwent a remarkable change from the moment we landed and you breathed in the warm air. You closed your eyes - inhaled - then looked straight at me for a moment with expression impenetrable. I have always felt you to have a _snowy_ face, cool and either pensive or neutral more often than not, but during those days tension simply seemed to fall off you. You let your hair tangle, billow out behind you like a cloud whenever you dove underneath the surface; you wore the same outfit for days on end, knowing that you could get away with it because we so seldom kept a set of clothes on for the whole day; you became indifferent to the idea of baring our naked bodies to each other, and would change nonchalantly in front of me if you couldn't be in private. You eased up, you slowed down. It was hard to tell how old you were as you lay there underneath the shade, for you had a poise years beyond what your physical form betrayed of your age. Sometimes people would come up to you to chat you up, both men and women, though you spoke not a word of Spanish nor English (more accurately, you _pretended_ not to understand either) and it was never long before they gave up and left. So we would stay like that, until we got hungry and one of us went to buy piña coladas and a juicy broiled burger, or when the sun set and we had to return to the hotel.

That is the recollection. Now the dream itself.

We are in the hotel pool and the sun is swelteringly hot. The pool isn't crowded, but we're hardly alone, either. (I don't remember the other swimmers in detail.) I am thrust into the dreamscape suddenly and rather unexpectedly, opening my eyes underwater and hurriedly surfacing as the chlorine stings them. When I raise my head, brush my curls to the side and look back, I see you at the other end of the pool, one leg dipped lazily in the water as you stay perched at the edge. The ceramic tiles are deep blue, worn, and vaguely chipped beneath you. Although you say nothing - and indeed during the entire dream, I never hear your voice - you eventually notice that I'm watching you; you bite your lip, half-shrug, then roll over straight into the water as if you were some kind of golden fish. Your body is a mix of still-boyish elements and a budding maturity, raw and wrenched open by the flow of time; somehow those two things mingle together without contradiction, the resulting form glistening like some ancient, polished ceramic. You surface, gasping for air, and wade out towards the shallow end to brush back your hair. The light reflected in the water lends a strange tension to your nipples, pink and perfect.

I feel myself harden in my swimming trunks. The cold water does nothing to dissuade it, yet I am not embarrassed.  
Merely appreciative.

The Ibizan landscape is as I remember it in my past, yet we are comfortably grown-up in it. I know this because our bodies have changed from what I remember. It really feels as if heaven as I think it must be - your happiest memory playing out for eternity with no regard to age - has manifested around us. I can't say that your attitude towards me has changed massively (I would not have _wanted_ it to), what with your occasional smirks and that quiet assurance that you are more worldly-wise than I. Sometimes I felt that you saw me as someone to protect, that you and I were like a hen and chick respectively. But I am now someone who wants to be naked with someone else. I am someone who loves the feel of skin, of sweat - of kissing - of coming. I want sex and beyond anything else I want closeness. So I stay at the other end of the pool to quietly admire you, seeking my comfort first and foremost in your mere presence, and I wonder all sorts of things - whether this is the right time to offer you a lemonade (and that I'd go and get it, of course), whether you wonder the same things about me, or if you are thinking of me at all. I wonder if that water isn't too cold for your tastes, whether you are virgin, who else might be looking at you as longingly as I am. I lie back and think that I would like to date you, one day, that it would be nice if you said yes. Either way, it's nice. The feeling I get in my chest from seeing you is satisfying enough on its own, though I would hardly protest more.

I dream of you like the white vanilla ice cream that we used to have on the beach, so soft and sweet and creamy that it would drip onto your fingers as we licked the cone; once it dripped right down your wrist, and as you hadn't yet put sunscreen on you were able to lick yourself clean without fanfare, only to have a few more drops fall onto and trickle down your bare thighs. _Then_ I needed to look away out of both respect for your person and a desire to hide my burning face. This memory would be a further arousing one if there was nothing more to this dream than what I have described of it so far. But you were only sixteen when we _actually_ went to Ibiza, and I only fifteen, so when I wake up and remember that little fact I just end up feeling immensely weirded out by myself.

And that's the end of that dream.

**21 July**

Didn't we fight while we were in Ibiza, too?  
We did. I forget that often.

I was younger then, but... I think I'd be lying if I said that my attraction to you had nothing whatsoever to do with that fight. It started that long a time ago. I was afraid even then that you would dislike me if I let on, that was all, and I had no idea how to deal with frustrations. Besides, you really _wouldn't_ let me take a sip out of your mojito and you really _did_ try to stop me going to that club. They were legitimate reasons to start a scuffle or two. Fair's fair.

**21 July**

(... But I just as often forget that the morning after the fight, when we heard about the double murder that took place in that club, I thanked you over and over and decided that this was a genuine case of a blessing in disguise.)

**23 July**

Solitude:  
having no one at home to whom you can say, _I shall be back at x time (so don't wait for me/leave the door open/etc.)_ , or,  
having no one whom you can call out as you walk through the door, _voilà, (darling/sweetheart/my friend/etc.), I am home now._

**25 July**

My loneliness got to be too much. The day is beautiful outside but I cannot enjoy it. Spent hours riding aimlessly on the Lines 2 and 4 so I could feel free of you for a change.

(Nirvana is apparently releasing a new album...  
but without Cobain, how?)

**27 July**

Six months and a week gone.

All day I spent reflecting on what the year has been to me, reading over the pages of this diary from the very beginning. And I have come to the conclusion that I have thoroughly failed this bi-yearly review; I thought by enduring your absence, I would become someone 'stronger', acceding as I might to worldly indifference. For what other abstract, yet objective truth is there except for the fact that we all die? Do I really believe that I will lose no one else for the rest of my life, am I still so naive as to believe that my loved ones are invincible? - how absurd! I believed that you would at least help me prepare for my future losses. But this hasn't been the case. I am more fragile than ever, in a complete state of abandon, and I don't know how to fix myself.

Though not sensible I feel that you are with me still; half a year on, survival guilt endures. The nightly sweep of traffic still fills me with fear, grazing the raw wound that your absent presence has left. All I can hope for is for your image to fade and retreat, becoming smaller and smaller until I sense that you are hardly there at all. I wish to eventually feel as if your distance from me is like the furthest star, too far away to induce any feeling or consequence within myself.

Like a heartbeat, my friend - you are indispensable.

But it is when I'm most myself, most alone in the midnight darkness - so dark that I could raise my hand to my eyes and not see an inch of it - there, I can freely desire to close my eyes and whisper your name, summoning you back to me without hurt.  
I sincerely welcome you and you return, improbably close by, your scent washing over mine again...

... though, of course, by now - you cannot come.

\-----

**01 August**

You left me and doomed me to live ever after with an asterisk next to certain events in my life, all ones that would have been better had you been there.

**02 August**

(Fits of nausea during the day)

I've not said much about this before, but:  
since you've been gone, digestive difficulties, as if I am suffering precisely where you took the greatest care: food.

Or maybe it is the heat - though I don't believe that it is.

**05 August**

Ran across Sven while I was taking a listless walk in the park. Not one anywhere near where I live, no - across the Seine, which is why I ran across him in the first place. I hadn't seen him for most of the year. We had a coffee together and sat together largely in silence; we are only distant friends, but a needed friend is still a needed friend. He knows what happened, too, and I think he was there at the funeral (not that I was paying attention to anyone there, only the coffin) though not for very long, and he knew better than to ask me questions about what was going on in my life.

I took it as a sign that my suffering was readily visible in my face, still. I don't really look in the mirror nowadays, I don't recognize the stranger within. It takes practice to learn to shave without looking into a mirror, I tell you.

**07 August**

I have not a desire but a desperate need for freedom  
(from you)  
(from myself)

**09 August**

Now look here.

I'm tired.  
I'm tired of letting you down every day and night, in reality and in dreams. Tired of never being enough, tired of never being able to hear your voice, tired of being deprived of the approval that I so desperately seek. Tired of being left behind. I am tired of writing. Explaining. Crying. Being angry. Wondering. Wondering, exactly, what it is that will make this pain stop. You hover over me like a ghost with unfinished business and I just don't know what you want.

It was for my sake that you were hurt so badly. You left me so abruptly that I could only hold onto the hope that if I approached this slowly, taking it one day at a time, I would one day be okay. One day I would be forgiven - one day I would be able to forgive _myself_ \- and even though I might not be happy, I might at least be okay again. But half the year has passed, and not only am I not okay in the slightest, I am beginning to doubt that _okay_ ever cut it in the first place. If okay still means that I feel your loss like a stab to the heart, when I am least expecting it, or that I keep hearing you call my name when I'm listening to music or walking somewhere, then I don't want it. I don't need it. I just can't do it anymore; they say something like this can last months and years, but I don't think I am ready to invest _that_ much into mourning your absence. You were my friend seven years. People have abandoned longer-lived friends over much less, and I daresay still for well-justified reasons. And the more I think about it the more I think the ghost of our friendship, with you alongside it, should not be allowed to interfere with the relationships I'm going to have in my future.

Our friendship evened out after a while, it never carried on the upward gradient that I'd liked it to have. So I want to move on.

...

I want to fall in love again.

And right now you're in the way of that.

...

Because of you my next relationship, and more than likely the few after it, will not be fulfilling.  
Oh, I don't have to worry about ending up miserable. I'm already there. I want the next object of my desires to be more beautiful than you are; they'll be sexy, they'll know how to have fun, and they'll like any random bullshit that comes on at the club and our relationship will be superficial and I will never have to write them desperate letters like this, pouring out all my hatred and anger and all the love in my heart. They won't make gnocchi from scratch, or read poems in German, or walk around with criminally tangled hair. They will never debate Leninism with me, go with me to Ibiza, or fight with me in Ibiza, or make up less than five minutes later with an awkwardly-offered hand and a chilled bottle of cider. They will never want to wear sunglasses in the pitch-black darkness when in underground clubs, just in case the strobe lights start blazing, and they will never fuss about making sure where the exits are and which way the doors open because they will never read up on or care about nightclub fires. When they go to Germany for a family vacation I won't worry about them calling me because they will never be going to Germany, nor will their cheeks redden when they accidently cite the current capital of Germany as Bonn and not Berlin. They will never challenge me or force me to grow, no matter how long I stay with them, and they will - they will -

\- they will never, ever be able to take the place you carved out for yourself in my heart.

I loved you unconditionally, chastely, and for the longest time with no intention of asking for my share.  
I look back on how much I loved you and it makes me sick to my stomach.

But we were never anything in the end, right? It's not like you'd have noticed anyway, right?

...

This cannot go on.

I have to let you go.  
_You_ have to let me go.

**09 August**

_Why can no one love me like I want to be loved?_

Translation: why can't someone near me turn out to be a completely _new_ entity, at the same time neither you, nor not-you?  
(For you also did not love me.)

**09 August**

He is currently having some kind of nervous breakdown and is wishing he was born richer and kinder and elsewhere

**10 August**

he is contemplating cutting ties with the day-to-day farce of getting through the next few hours in an attempt to ward off the fact that he doesn't know how to get through the next ten/twenty/thirty/forty/infinity years all on his ownsome

**10 August**

he's talking about himself in the third person because the idea of being who he is/what he did/the person he has become is more than his pride can take

**10 August**

he's sick to the fucking gills of himself  
and he wishes and wishes and wishes that something  
anything at all  
will happen to make the clock tick for him again

**10 August**

just someone else, anyone, any other body but this.

**10 August**

remembering you is like opening a vein

**11 August**

i write the truth and it is killing me i cannot do this any longer.  
fuck you and fuck everything I cannot believe  
how much  
I fucking miss you  
every single day that I am living  
and this is absurd and completely against nature.  
there is no goddamn reason or right  
_none whatsoever_  
for me to keep hurting this badly every fucking night  
you've run out of reasons to do this to me.

_go away!_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [ **EDIT:** As of 12/Aug/2015 the notes have been moved to [their own 'chapter' at the end](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4334822/chapters/10380342).  
>  For the second part, ' _Spoken to the Evening_ ':
> 
> \- the entries of 21, 22, 25, 27 and 29 April,  
> \- the entries of 03, 05, 08, 17, 18 and 26 May,  
> \- the entries of 08, 09, 10, 23, 24 and 20 June,  
> \- the entries of 01, 04, 09, 12, 13, 16, 21 and 25 July,  
> \- and the single entry of 05 August were given notes.]
> 
> One more part to go. Please comment or [message me](http://kimbk.tumblr.com/ask) if you liked this piece so far - it would mean very much to me.  
> Healing is difficult and yet it must be done.


	3. The Fall

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **There are trigger warnings for this chapter.**  
>  I don't think there is a specific entry to watch out for, but there is a constant drop towards deep, suicidal depression prominent in the text. It is not mild nor merely alluded to. I would take it slow. No gore, no blood, though there are drug mentions throughout. Maybe some blasphemy on 19th December.
> 
> There are notes for this chapter but they are obscenely long. I've therefore decided to put all notes in a separate chapter of their own, organized by month, just so the aesthetics of the proper chapters will be preserved. This shouldn't take long.

**All I Was Doing Was Breathing (Part 03) -** _'The Fall'_

**\--------------------**

**22 September**

...

...

It's been a while, again.

Let me begin with the conclusion. I've decided to take a year off from university.  
Officially it's a leave of absence - but really, I don't think I'll be able to go back ever again.

Classes began today, but I could only manage to go in for a short while, to put in my form and get everything approved. I couldn't get out of there fast enough.

Maybe this is a surprise to you. I haven't talked about this at all before. But in fact, I've been thinking about doing this for a very long time. I tried a few times to write it on here, or head over to your grave to tell you about it, but I was never quite able to make myself begin. I don't think that was in any way your fault, of course; it was my misfortune, and my business. My classes simply weren't relevant to the kind of things I really wanted to talk about here, anyway. So there you are.

So what am I intending to do during this year? I'll tell you: I'm going traveling.  
I've been to many places by now, Maman and Papa have taken me along to so many places and I developed a taste for travel early on. And now it's my turn to journey on my own. There are too many _things_ here, too many memories and responsibilities that hold me captive; familiarity comes at the cost of necessary attachment, and sometimes, they become too much to deal with. I need to get away from here for a while, and even though it's taken me most of the year to realize it, I have decided to sacrifice what I know in exchange for a blank slate (or what's close to it, anyway). I am starting off slow, of course. I've booked a small apartment in Argenteuil for the time being, and I'm living there for a while to see how I feel about being alone. Perhaps merely getting away from home to stay somewhere else, even somewhere as close as Argenteuil, will do the trick; perhaps it will not. But if that's the case, I will move to a city further away, and further, and further, until I feel like I can return to Paris again.

Papa is wholly supportive, Maman to this date isn't sure. This was decided in late August. I wouldn't say that it was easy to persuade her - Papa agreed almost immediately, it's him who helped me to rent the apartment and give me advice - but, well. How should I describe this? - _I cannot be persuaded otherwise_. Now that I've been thinking of leaving, and now that I've actually begun to pack up my belongings, I can't wait to depart from here. My journey begins on the twenty-fourth.

I hope this period of wandering will finally give me the peace I've been seeking for so long.

(Many more things happened in August, but they were all vastly unimportant compared to this, so I'll just leave it there.)

**23 September**

Laurent came over early this morning to say goodbye. He gave me a hug and asked me to write every so often.  
Told him yes.

...

I mentioned above this entry that many things happened in August; he was my rock for some of them, and I am eternally thankful to him for it. (He doesn't know about the rest.) He was the first one I told about my plans, and even though I specifically asked my parents to not visit - preferring to limit my communication to letters only - I did tell Laurent that if he ever needed me, he will be welcome to visit me in Argenteuil. If I feel better after a few weeks (I think I will be there for a while, at least), maybe I can even take a day trip back to Paris and meet up with him. I'm not going too far away after all.

Optimism can be humble like that.

Before he left he gave me an envelope; I opened it when he'd left, and out fell a folded handwritten note alongside a medal of St. Christopher. The note was only brief and didn't say anything that he hadn't already told me, but I appreciated it all the same - something of his to hold onto. I put on the St. Christopher immediately and the silver was reassuringly cool against my neck. Even as I write this I am wearing it.

May I be protected on my voyage. If not by St. Christopher, then you, my guardian angel.  
I've never prayed before, but now might be a good time to start. I pray to you who I believe is residing in heaven.

**23 September**

Six nineteen in the evening. I'm all packed and ready to go, and dinner's cooking downstairs.  
Brisket, onions, assorted vegetables and roasted potatoes - a favourite of mine, made specially for my sake, because it'll be a while before I'll taste my parents' cooking again. In the meanwhile, let me tell you about the meeting I had this afternoon - with your brother.

Because of the great lacuna between September and August I've not had a chance to go into detail regarding anything with Paul. I've kept in touch with him, yes - for this I know you'd want to know the ending first - and even though penning the first letter was agonizing, I've written to him at least once a week since reconciling with him. It's gotten easier. I can't say we ever talk about _significant_ things, or that we have long heart-to-hearts through those letters, as you and I might have done. As he said, he isn't you, and it doesn't seem fair to ask him to deal with my problems on top of what he's already going through.

(I've not met your parents yet. But they are aware of the fact that I met with Paul that day. They sent their love once.)

I mentioned that I'd be away from Paris for a while in the last letter I wrote him; he insisted on a meeting shortly afterwards, listing the times and dates that he would be available to take a call immediately. Through some trial and error we arranged to go to a small bistro for lunch, and that's where we met this afternoon. The food was good, though I don't think either of us were paying much attention to it.

At least it was easier for us talk to each other this time around.

He asked me if he could write to my new residence; I said yes.  
He asked if I was enjoying your Hugo; I said yes to that too.  
When I inquired about your parents he insisted that they were fine.  
(They plan to visit your grave again in October.)  
We had a minor, almost playful spat regarding who was paying; I did in the end, thinking it the more polite option.  
As we left the bistro, I offered him a cigarette. He in turn offered me a light. As the smoke spiralled into the air, he sighed - breathed out, frowning slightly as he inhaled the smoke back into his lungs - and looked at me for a long time.

"You have changed so much," he said. "it's strange. I feel as if this is the last time I'll get to talk to you."

...

I wish I'd known what to say to that. But I didn't and still don't, and what he said went unanswered. But the burden of the answer, and to an extent the meaning of his words, lay heavily between us. When we parted he gave me an envelope and said that you'd have wanted me to 'have them': there were two sterling-silver bracelets inside, the exact ones you wore all the time, cleaned and polished as if they'd only just been bought. Because he told me to open the envelope when I was home, I sat there for a long time, staring down at them glittering innocently upon my palm. A memento from a time best left forgotten.

...

I will be taking them with me.  
I shan't look at them much, I imagine. Paul will surely think of them far more than I. But I _am_ glad that they are with me.

... Yes. That is all.

**23 September**

Anticipation and anxiety, I cannot sleep. Here's a confession.

Around a month ago I did almost submit and come back to you prematurely. I'd had another dream, in which you - how cruel it was! - were telling me that I didn't really love you. At the time I took it calmly because I knew it to be untrue, only to let anger consume me at the end. I seriously contemplated returning to this journal to condemn you even further for messing with my mind. But then my dreams are mine, aren't they? You're not responsible for those.

Maybe venting would have done me a lot of good. But I didn't, in the end. One is always capable of doing so many things, and yet we often end up not exercising this capability at all.

...

I need to go to bed.

**24 September**

Morning. Sunshine. Soon I'll be leaving home.  
A bird with a gentle, rather literary song wakes me - minimal traffic, solitude, street-lamps just beginning to click off.

Peace. No aggression.

And yet - more than ever, in this calm suspended air, a sadness like no other. It is quite a terrible thing to think, the notion of abandoning those streets along which you once ran, shouting: _Thomas, we need to hurry or we'll miss the train!_

**24 September**

Necessities (to buy on arrival):  
Hand soap  
Detergent (laundry)  
Cleaner  
Towel x 5  
Soap  
Shampoo/conditioner  
First aid kit  
Toothbrush/toothpaste (spare)  
Batteries  
Duct tape  
Sewing kit  
Candles  
Matches  
Pencils  
Pens  
Notebook (spare)

Groceries:  
Apples  
Pears  
Tomatoes  
Bananas  
Potatoes  
Onion/shallots  
Carrots  
Beef (minced)  
Chicken  
Fish (trout/salmon?)  
Apple juice  
Yoghurt  
Salt/pepper  
Soy sauce  
Flour  
Rice  
Eggs  
Tomato puree  
Cornflour  
Baking powder/soda  
Vinegar  
Pasta  
Bread  
Couscous  
Milk  
Paprika  
Olive oil

(... Quick list, drafted on the train.)

**25 September**

The train ride wasn't at all long, the search for my apartment hardly took more than twenty minutes altogether; a mere hour after leaving home and I was already settled into my new place. It's a three-storey building and my apartment's on the top floor. Most of the necessities and the furniture were already there, I only really needed to stock up on groceries, cleaning products and toiletries; the sofa is a little hard, and I cannot see much from here, but I didn't choose Argenteuil for the view. It's a nice, cosy little apartment and I admit to being rather enamoured with it already!

I've rented it until the end of November - it may be that I'll stay well into December and the New Year, though I think I'll move on after that. There is genuine comfort in this solitude. I spent all yesterday shopping, getting settled in, and checking out my surroundings. Where the bars and restaurants are, what shops there are nearby, if there are any interesting places to go to during the day. By _interesting_ I don't mean anything profound, of course - I'm not a _tourist_. A serene walking path or a park would be quite enough.

There's a library nearby and while on the train I took note of a scenic bridge or two in the distance. I'll have to explore this area a little further after breakfast.

Currently working on a letter to Maman and Papa.  
I feel... _liberated._

**27 September**

I have spent the past couple of days doing nothing but being out and about, wandering everywhere and making a mental sketch of Argenteuil. It is quieter here compared to central Paris and I recognize no one, which is good. Most people my age tend to be working or studying during the daytime hours, so I don't encounter many of them either. No one shows me much interest, which is exactly how I like it.

It's not solitude I need the most; it is _anonymity._

The excitement and anxiety having worn off, I have made myself comfortable in this place. I know better than to be overexcited, to build up lofty expectations that can only end in disappointment - every new place I visit will get its own share of excitement and the urge to explore and make new, yes, but in the end they are still _places where people live in_. Best to treat them that way instead of with some inherent curiosity. As much as I find the mundane to be suffocating, I need to accept its existence in its various forms in every place I go to, because those ordinary happenings are what establish life for the majority of people there. To be comfortable in ordinary, daily life yet always seeking a variation in it, just so that I won't get smothered by the weight of everything around me - that is my goal.

I will say that it feels strange, how different this place feels to Paris - when it isn't far away from it at all.  
Twelve or thirteen kilometres to the heart of the city. Everywhere else is alien to home, regardless of how far away you might be; I think that might even be the essence of what makes a home.

...

I read up on this feeling in the local library, almost by pure chance. What I gained was insightful and also quite comforting.  
Would you like to hear about it?

...

I've never read him before I set foot in the library, but - this is with the help of one Mircea Eliade.  
He represents the world as two crossed lines, or planes rather, the vertical and the horizontal: the vertical plane is the path that lies between heaven and the world of the dead, the link from top to the bottom. The horizontal plane on the other hand represents a kind of two-dimensional traffic, a chaos of people moving back and forth. For all people the lines intersect at different places, but where the lines come together - to fulfil a _balance_ between the living and the dead, the present inhabitants of the world and whatever ancestral spirits there might be - all else falls silent and order is achieved. This is what home is, where you can make the most sense of your reality - your own _heart of the real._

This results in the conclusion that home is not necessarily a geographical location; it can be as abstract as a single idea in your mind, or as inconstant as a person whom you have trusted with your heart. Leaving home only happens because there's a home to leave, and this separation reaches down beyond just the spatial distance. It is the _emotional_ separation that we cannot handle, whether wanted or unwanted, steady or ambivalent. And when you finally lose your home - as happens to too many people - what is one to do in that case? When you lose that vital co-ordinate, what happens to your sense of self? Must you carry that unsteady heart of yours and journey on until you find somewhere else to go or something/someone else to rely on?

At best, you can make up for it for the time being.  
At best, you can imagine yourself a new, better home.  
At best, you can afford to work towards it, and one day you might even get it. You can hope to be stable again.

But in the worst case scenario, the displaced person literally loses the sense of which way is up. Their compass spins helplessly, the needle twisting to and fro, and they no longer know where they are nor where they should go. Home is much more than shelter; it is our centre of gravity. Oh, some people know to take their homes _with_ them, and it might well be an ability worth learning. In those cases, they attribute importance to smaller things that can be carried easily and spread out again from place to place; they stop expecting any physical stability in their lives, and instead focus on attaining an emotional continuity via the existence of smaller objects and concepts. Such mental stability requires a sturdy structure on the inside - and that structure is shaped necessarily by what happens on the outside, even if it's only to the extent of realizing that _what happens on the outside_ is best not relied upon. Through the interaction of those two series of events, we form the shell in which we learn to live.

...

As for me?

Your absence has deprived me of a true north. At the moment, regardless of where on earth I am dropped, I'm sure I'll learn to survive in most of those places - but because I was foolish enough to conflate my figurative compass with your existence, I wouldn't know what to make of any of those places, or what I should become in response to what I experience there. Even in Paris, my home by all geographical and spatial definitions of the word - even there, surrounded by love and familiar sights, all I was doing was breathing; I must learn to go beyond the simple motions of survival, and rediscover what it is that makes my sustained existence a _life_ again.

Yes.

...

I think I've grown up just a little in the past few months. I wonder if you'd have been proud of me.  
I write this after having made myself a nice dinner of baked cannelloni with tomato, beef, cheese and mushrooms, washed down with a particularly sweet rosé. My mind is very awake, though I am sated and at peace. The best state to be in.

... I think I will sleep well tonight.

**27 September**

_Suivre la vérité me suffit; sans rien voir_  
_Que le grand but sublime,_  
_Je marche, en deuil, mais fier; derrière le devoir_  
_Je vais droit à l'abîme._

\- From Hugo.

(I have been making good progress through your copy. I believe that I was previously mistaken in my judgement of him.)

**28 September**

Sometimes you come to me in a dream not as a person but as raw _sensation_ , brief and hot and brutal.

Those dreams have no context nor situation. I don't know how old we are, where we are, what we look like, what time it is, or what we're wearing. I don't even see you in those dreams, necessarily - I feel you and know that you are there, and that is all the reassurance I need. Without vision all my other senses are heightened; the very twitch of your pulse against my fingertips, the light brush of your breath down my neck, all of those things stimulate me. I imagine your fingers wrapping around and stroking my length, squeezing now and then seemingly only to confirm that rock-hard solidity. My fingers in turn reach out and come away with clothing - this bundle of light cotton fabric must be your shirt, the heavier denim your trousers, this rectangular piece of cloth your boxers (sometimes they're briefs). I do this enough times until I feel no more clothes to take off you, then the world lurches forwards and you are beneath me, your nipples small and tight beneath my fingers and tongue - I spread your legs wide and press myself against you, waiting for your approval. Sometimes the anticipation is all that's needed to lurch me awake, drenched in sweat and something else; sometimes the affirmation _does_ come, in the form of your hands tightening on my shoulder, an embrace or (rarely) your mouth settling soft upon my own, then I drive into you so hard that you cleave to me, hips rocking, enfolding me, enticing me, your skin like a brand against mine. I hear you moan and cry out even though your voice never quite sounds right. Your chest heaves with hot, hard breaths, and sometimes I can sense from that alone that I'm hurting you, at which point I slow down or stop, preferring to kiss or caress your body until you're begging me for more. When I press my lips against the delicate skin of your throat, bruising it, I often imagine myself coming into contact with the clasp of the chain around your neck - the small crucifix dangling limply across your breast - at which point I edge my teeth against it until it comes undone, the chain unravelling in a heap, liberating you from the weight of that silver cross. There is a perverse enjoyment in the fact that you never seem to notice nor care. In those dreams, you're too lost in the pleasure I'm giving you and I'm only too glad to oblige - I have you all to myself, hidden even from the eyes of God. In those dreams I fear nothing.

Then I wake up and realize that I have doomed myself to a waking life of terror, for all that fear has to go _somewhere._

(How long - how long until the end of this tragic obsession?  
How long until the eternal sleep?)

**29 September**

Another pathetic attempt to put into words my continued morbid attraction to you - and the justification for it, based on what the memories of you do to me: friends don't give friends several orgasms, whether in a dream or not.

**30 September**

Symptoms:  
Not sleeping  
Barely eating  
Barely conversing  
Increase in sex drive  
Wants to die.

Diagnosis:  
Pathological grief.

Prescription:  
Lustral 50mg / initial dose, ten weeks.

Potential Side Effects:  
Insomnia  
Anxiety  
Dizziness  
Anorexia  
Weight gain  
Lack of sex drive  
Suicidal ideation.

Verdict:  
We'll see.

\-----

**01 October**

Freshly brewed coffee from the cafe around the corner, only obtainable during the first hour the place is open.  
Consumed in ten minutes with an almond croissant and an apple.  
Visit to the liquor store.  
A can of soda spilt on the pavement, the surface of the puddle leaking from it pockmarked with still-popping bubbles.  
Pigeons (cocoa/salt and pepper/iridescent/icy/pure white/mixed/eager to mate regardless of season).  
Crimson tomatoes in market stalls, a few metres away a vendor spins cotton candy.  
Long, cold, but sunny afternoons spent in the library.  
Passing by a narrow alleyway, bistros, adult bookshops and shuttered windows, smoky cellars and smoking sellers.  
Flecks of golden/silver pyrite embedded in the road.  
Vertical slats on every other window; mostly blue in colour, paint immaculate.  
Handing several bills to the dealer five crossings and two shops away, walking out with the bag of powder.  
Deep golden quiches; excellent coffee, at first sip so bitter as to induce tears; shiny worn wooden tabletops.  
Pause at the skate park - maybe not too late to begin, myself?  
A moment's reflection by the fountain; sometimes a food stall is nearby, though I hardly ever indulge.  
Escorts outside rows of neon-light clubs, promising a good time. A handsome young gigolo kissing an offered hand.  
Emptying my last Franc for the day into the guitar case of a street musician playing 'You Can't Hurry Love'.  
Only then starting back to my room, pondering if I should turn the radiator on when I get there, and eventually not doing so.

[Sketches of my life in Argenteuil - a week in.]

**04 October**

The more time passes the more I think - no, the more I _realize_ that I would not have been the best partner for you, my blue-eyed dreamer; I am too young, overly jealous, and spiteful a creature _now_ , and was hardly better when you were still here. You might not have been the best partner for me either, and perhaps you might not have cared to try at all, for you were always too certain of yourself and too straightforward, but I wouldn't have minded. Though sometimes you lacked affection, at least nothing about you was ever malicious, unlike me. I suppose it says something about me that I know my faults, but with no improvement - what of it?

...

But I would have liked to _try._  
I would have tried my best as a lover if I had ever been given a chance, and perhaps I could have been a good one. And even if it hadn't worked out, having my heart broken by you (alive) would have taught me some important lessons in life, and eventually I would have been able to heal. Become a better person.

I would have liked... to try.

**05 October**

So what I am saying, in effect, is that I blame you for not fixing me.

**08 October**

Slept, awoke, slept, awoke, miserable life.

**09 October**

The skies in Argenteuil are so spotlessly blue and cold. It's both lovely and sad to stare at, and every time I gaze up at it, it makes me think of you. I've only seen it rain here a couple of times since I settled in, and the skies are high and cloudless most of the time. I wonder if you're watching me from above. I wonder what exactly you're perched on, should you actually be watching me, when there's not a single cloud in sight. I wonder if you in some abstract manner enjoy the small delights of life from where you are, whether in terms of good music or bad poetry, and I wonder if you gaze down upon my sleeping form every night and still like what you see. The more time passes, the more I doubt this.

Free of what is familiar and stale, I spend a lot of time wondering and guessing nowadays. Inevitably some of my contemplations involve you; I can't help wondering the most far-fetched things. A lot of those fantasies I'm indulging in now are not ones that I ever thought of when you were still with me. I used to think about asking you out, and the first few dates we'd have had, though never in too much detail. I didn't dare to think beyond that back then, too focused on keeping what was already by my side. But now I re-imagine those days in real time, imagining the ghost of you next to me as I go about my daily routine - holding hands with you as we breathe in the cold autumn air, the faint warmth from you tying a scarf around my neck when I'm getting ready to go out, thinking how nice it would be to buy supper for two when I'm waiting at a döner kebab stall, watching the creamy, delectable sauce run through. The pita bread and _frites_ warm in my hand.

I think about what kissing you would have felt like. I think about what our first time together would have been like, too. Maybe we'd have planned it, set a date and time, and we'd have gone about it in gentlemanly fashion in my bedroom or yours when we were alone together. Maybe it'd have been spontaneous and intense, my passion towards you laying you out on the carpet with a cushion to support your back, or perhaps you would have had me splayed out on your desk, books and pens and ancient mementos scattered beneath my roaming hands as you gripped my hips and brought us both (vulnerable/naked/content) into adulthood. I like that idea, too. I like imagining being treated so gently by you, your fingers spreading like a blanket over my back, cautious _around_ me as if you were holding a soft, milky-polished opal upon your palm. Handling me like I was something _special_. Our body heat mingling into a fever, not a single stitch of fabric getting in our way. Muffling my cry into your shoulder with that first firm push - that one hot, squirming moment where I might have changed my mind - before letting my head fall back and pulling you closer/harder/deeper into me, because if _anyone_ was going to split me open and see how soft I was capable of glistening, I wouldn't have wanted anyone else. My threads unravelling around the edges, shamelessly exposed for your eyes only. (In the deepest, most painful and ecstatic throes of the night, the moment I feel that I am incapable of keeping silent, I arch my back and cry out _fuck me, please, Thomas_ , trying to make your half of the dialogue real as well as mine.) I wonder whether you'd have been shy or assertive, whether you or I would have been on top, whether we would have been able to laugh about it afterwards. Sex is _awkward_ no matter who you have it with, more often than not; with you I'd have been able to accept those moments with ease. I just find it embarrassing with anybody else, and feel awful for hours on end. I like imagining the morning-after scenarios too, though for that one part I'm fairly certain that _I'd_ always have woken up cuddled against _your_ chest, and not the other way around.

(I am also bizarrely certain that I would have made you breakfast, and that it'd have been two fried duck eggs with firm yolks and a pinch of salt and pepper, served with lightly buttered toast.)

Beyond that point I think of things that would have been ambiguous and questionable even if you'd lived. What it would have felt like to be hand in hand with you for years on end, even how we'd have gone about it if we'd ever decided to get married...

**10 October**

... and I also wonder if you, later in life, would have wanted children. You having been only twenty years old when the accident happened, it was far too early for you to think about that sort of thing - as far as I know you never did so and I'll never get to know your thoughts on the matter.

But I know this - they'd have been the most beautiful children, if they'd been yours.

...

(But that would have likely come about with you loving, and starting a family with, someone else.)

...

(So in other words - the most likely scenario.  
Had you lived.  
_Especially_ if you had lived.)

**13 October**

my skin still carries the ghost of your breath, my hand still roaming over your sex, my mouth arches over darkest midnight;  
you are still my desire.  
what is my desire - if not for you?

it's nice that no one knows nor can see how much you want to make me miserable  
and how i'd still let you do it all over again

**15 October**

Lying in bed with a box of wine and seven dirty plastic glasses by my side, when I realized that I have been telling myself that I've been having a rough week nearly for the past fifty-two weeks in a row.

But I didn't, like, do anything about it. Why would I?  
This here isn't sin, it's my life, and I need it.

**18 October**

You know it's time to do the dishes when you're sitting on your bed at half one in the morning valiantly trying to eat a can of peaches with a butter knife.

_(later)_

Actually, I've figured this out. You need to let the syrup slide off before impaling it in one go. Well.  
I guess the dishes can wait until the afternoon.

**19 October**

[Flashback to 13th August:  
Dinner with friends. In the restaurant ( _Le Pavillon du Lac_ /beautiful decor/nineteenth _arrondissement_ ), T at one point throws his cutlery down and disappears; L thinks that it's due to a quarrel they've had earlier, about a possible double date or a nightclub gig invitation or something unimportant like that. It was _that_ irrelevant of a quarrel, but in his distress he too leaves looking for T, returns in a sweat, agonized, blaming himself. Recalls suicidal attempts T threatened offhandedly two days ago, leaves again, heads right out into the depths of the park to look for him, etc. The meal is ruined. No one but T has any semblance of fun, and by the time he has been retrieved, he isn't having any fun, either. This incident sparks the thought in T's head that maybe he needs to leave altogether for a while.]

General discussion.  
Is T insane or merely cruel? How can anyone know?

_(later)_

And I think: you would have said that one cannot make someone who they love suffer.  
_You_ never made anyone _you_ loved suffer; that was your definition, the innocence that you kept long after most people lost theirs. You could be brash, you were sometimes colder than I had patience for, and I have had entire conversations with you where I perpetually felt as if you were scolding me for some perceived wrong - but you drew the line at making me actively suffer, or even letting anyone harm me in that way.

It is ironic that your final act to save me from suffering has resulted in my greatest suffering yet.

Does that make you as cruel as I am?

I don't know.  
But I cling onto that thought. It's a major reason why I haven't apologized properly to you for what I said back in August, because I'm not sure if I can apologize right now and mean it wholeheartedly. What use is apologizing if I'm not going to mean it, and will probably end up yelling at you again at some point, carrying on this horrid, thoughtless cycle? You deserve better than that.

...

You do.

_(3:46 PM)_

One more confession while I'm at it. I'd hoped to keep this incident out of the diary altogether - maybe pass it off as an unfortunate overreaction from Laurent or myself, if I ever had to mention it - but I've already spilled the figurative beans on the subject. There is no lying to you, even though I do make valiant attempts at it. But I'm sitting at a park bench at the moment and the day is nice and a man walking his dog just smiled at me as he passed by and I feel genuinely quite at ease, enough to confess to my wrongdoing without overt self-pity or justification.

...

That quarrel between Laurent and I, the one that took place two days before I walked out on my friends.  
It wasn't an _unimportant_ quarrel. At least, he didn't think that from the beginning, and now that I'm putting some thought to it, I guess that it was actually quite a serious thing after all.

...

He caught me in the most ordinary of places. My own bedroom. An Erasure vinyl spinning lazily on the record player.  
As he was shouting at me, I wondered vaguely whether it would be worse to tell him that he'd actually caught me snorting pain pills, or whether it'd be best to let him continue to believe that it was cocaine.

I chose the latter in the end. He still doesn't know.

...

So now this secret is between just the two of us, I guess.  
I know you'd scorn me for breaking my promise. Maybe you'd even hate me, I'd deserve it for sure; I wrote the last entry of August while on a personal binge, taking what was lying around the house in lieu of actually going outside and getting something from a friend or a dealer. (I've just flicked back to that entry to check, and it really does show.) It's true, too, what I wrote about suicide. That was stupid and I admit to that, too. I don't know why, but I'm getting an odd pleasure out of admitting to all my faults. Call it a _distancing effect_ ; perhaps if I made myself into the very person you would have despised, in good time I'd stop thinking that I was in any way worthy of your attention. It hurts to think of healing in that way - I still naively hold onto the idea that healing's meant to make _everything_ better - but for all I know, it may turn out to a bridge better off burnt completely, so that I don't waste any more time trying to cross it again.

_(later)_

By 'it' I mean you.

_(nightfall / 8:32 PM)_

Well I don't mean you _literally._  
You are not an 'it', but this diary is.

I have spent more time forgetting that than not, and I think by doing so I have caused too much trouble for myself.

_(12:37 PM)_

I was twelve then I was fifteen and I am now nineteen and I am somehow more lost than I imagined myself being.  
Can I get it all back? Please?

**21 October (?)**

Love is man unfinished.

**22/23 october (?)**

dead is all and all is dead  
in my silver breadbasket a slice of poisoned apple that i could not stomach rots and vanishes  
condemned is each place/thing/half-baked feeling that passes by me and which i no longer take into account  
a life sentence with you which cannot be carried out in your absence

every night I open my eyes and crawl forth to meet the white angel who visits  
she lays herself in neat rows like moonbeams and waves to me with a smile

and i bend down

through the delicate membrane of my skin i devour her, every little grain.

...

the empty pen drops from my fingers

then i see heaven and i am all right again for a while

**23 (?)**

ahaha

haha  
yes

 

 

 

talking to myself again.

**25 October**

The young men of Argenteuil greet me in a remarkably Racinian manner, with a gentle and almost polite willingness: _do you see me, do you want to touch me? What about me, may I feel your body?_ This is in direct contrast to the central Parisians, the brash, fast-talking, young Kerouacs in the making, the breathless rhythm of their words weaving an uneasy spell over one's body: _mon Dieu, you're a pretty one, and believe me when I say I'd know a thing or two about that - this is only the most beautiful city in the world with the prettiest girls and boys, and among them you truly stand out. No lie. Say, would you care for a bit of snuff?_

I still meet that dealer, by the way. He's the closest I have to a friend here. I've talked to a few people here and there, and I'm slowly being recognized as a regular in some of the shops I frequent, but I can't say that I'm all that close to anyone in Argenteuil; he's the exception. I have to hand it to him - he's done a good job, seeking out the new arrival in town, making it easier for me to get my snuff for the next few days. What's more, he doesn't deal in pills of any kind, which makes me feel like I'm still on the _safe side_. Easing my guilt. Making me forget.

...

I don't really know why I'm telling you this.  
Maybe I'm hoping for you to give me some kind of sign? For you to appear in my dreams, maybe, shaking me by the collar and shouting at me to get my life together. I switch rapidly between two states of being: that of wanting a well-thought out intervention that'll help me get better in the long term, and of wanting someone to accompany me to my darkened room, kissing my neck with rum on their breath as I unlock the door, before they shove me roughly onto my bed and fuck me until I come. I think you can guess which of those two states are achieved more quickly.

...

I don't let anyone suspicious in, or anything.  
So... so don't you... worry about that. I'm fine.

~~**27 October** ~~

~~Going out for dinner later.  
Maybe a drink or two as well? ~~

~~ Reminder: ~~  
~~Post letters.~~  
~~While at the post office, buy: stamps (x2 sheets) and pens (x2).~~  
~~Call to Maman and Papa.~~

**27/28 October (?)**

forgive me  
i have done a terrible, terrible thing

oh my god  
oh, oh - my god  
i feel sick even thinking about it

**28 October**

...

Two in the afternoon with all curtains drawn and the phone cord pulled out of its socket my thoughts begin to unravel again. Since returning to the apartment last night I have been unable to sleep or eat, merely lying facedown with the blankets tugged over my head, only flinching every now and then every time I think someone is at the door or that the phone will ring (somehow). I have only just gotten up and while I kind of feel faint and sick, I have to get this entry over and done with.

Forgive me, my love, for I have sinned.

...

Last night, I...

I used someone for sex.

...

Laurent was wrong about me all along.

It started with a piano. That damned piano - if only the cursed instrument had been _portable_ , then none of this would ever have happened! There was no feasible way that I could take ours on my journey, so I've had to do without since I left home. None of this has helped with my loneliness, of course; even when safe and away from mundane concerns, I've so far been finding it difficult to adjust to life without you. What I feel is beyond homesickness or the thought that I can't live on my own - I'm talking of an _essential_ failure in the works, something that no amount of other friends, a stable income, or other worldly pursuits can fix. But because I am also - accursedly - _alive_ in this world, with an expectation to remain that way for as long as possible, I have _some_ reason to want this state of affairs amended. All of that might not be an excuse for what I did, but I think they offer some kind of explanation as to why I felt the way I did last night.

I wanted something without the responsibility.  
I wanted to be not so wretchedly lonely for once.  
I wanted a warm body to adore for one night only, never to be encountered again as long as I live.  
I wanted to grasp at the faintest shadow of what I so desperately wanted to have with you one day.  
I wanted to be anonymous, hidden from the world, hidden from even my partner for the night. I wanted to become a creature who was able to take what they wanted without having to stick around for the consequences. I don't even know why that hit me particularly hard yesterday, but it did. Here in Argenteuil I have been attracting some low-key attention from both men and women while out in bars and cafes - being new to the area and _very_ visibly single - but that wasn't what I wanted. I deliberately took the bus to Colombes just so I could guarantee that whoever I ended up with, I would never see them again after I left. (I'd have liked to go further, but then I'd have had to _spend the night at their place_ or something - a horrific notion.)

And you know something? It was easy. I went into the first bar I could think of. Ordered a double whiskey and a beer.  
Took about one second to down the double whiskey, feeling it burn strong in my throat, filling me with premature Dutch courage. While I was on my second beer, _he_ arrived. Slim-built. Softly spoken. A little shorter than me, but taller than you. Dark hair. Long hair, about as long as yours was. Light hazel eyes, similar to neither you nor myself. Can't say I noticed him at first, though I glanced over when he sat down next to me and ordered a drink. He had lovely hands - long, deft, pianist fingers. That's the first thing I remember about him.

One thing and the other. From that moment I started paying attention.

By the end of that second beer he'd shifted the bar stool closer to mine.  
By the start of the third we'd swapped names. He was a neat little thing, a real pretty boy. Not you, but close enough. Fine white teeth, good manners, and an eager charm about him rare in other men. I pretended I was twenty-two and he seemed ecstatic to have found someone his own age to talk to.  
I told him that I played the piano. He said he had one at his place, something about him once wanting to become a professional pianist. He still played now and then in exchange for payment at small-scale weddings and such. And as I said, it was the piano that decided it all for me.

He started calling me by my first name, and I let him.

We freshened up with a glass of water and he asked me for my number. Desperate to hook him, I obliged; I had meant to write down a fake number in case this exact question was asked, but in my haste I wrote down the _real_ one, a mistake only realized after I'd handed the piece of paper to him. But what could I _do_ at that point? Snatch it out of his hand? I watched somewhat helplessly as he folded up the paper and stuck it in his pocket; sometime during the night I would have to steal it back out of there, or otherwise do whatever it took to prevent him from ever finding me. I didn't think this would be hard - he seemed quite taken with me, certainly not the type to begrudge me when he found himself alone and the piece of paper gone from his pocket in the morning. In fact, I'm sure I was making myself ill because I was blowing up a minor problem out of proportion. Seeing that I was looking rather grim, he asked if I wanted to go outside for a smoke, and I said yes.

We lit up. Gauloises for me, Benson and Hedges for him.  
He asked me if I was cold and offered to hold my hand in his pocket. When our fingers brushed he shyly pressed something into my palm, something foil-wrapped and square, and smiled up at me.

...

I told you. It was ridiculously easy. He really was - and I mean this in the most literal sense - asking for it.

I followed him to his place. Not far away, maybe ten or fifteen minutes. Around the halfway point he seemed to be slowing down, suddenly rather shy, and to dispel his nervousness I kissed him beneath a streetlight; other than that the trip was uneventful. When we got there he threw off his jacket and went into the kitchen to fix us both a screwdriver. Because of this I was left to explore the house freely, and within seconds I'd spotted the piano that I'd so desperately missed; I made a beeline for it and breathed in its warm woody scent, lifting up the lid, figuring that the neighbours wouldn't mind it overmuch to hear me playing a piece or two. I won him over so quickly that it was still early evening when we arrived at his place.

Czerny for light-hearted practice.  
A little Alkan here and there to impress.  
After that, finally, a spot of flawless Debussy. At this point the romantic, restless soul is yours for the taking.

(I just pulled that prescription out of nowhere, but it worked for him, anyway.)

He rested his hand on my shoulder. Spoke my name, all soft and quiet, like I was his everything.  
It was then we laid down on the bed.

...

He had to help me get it in, though he didn't seem to think less of me for it. I'm sure he didn't think I did too badly. He certainly _sounded_ appreciative, what with all the moaning and pleading for more. Ten minutes of the most joyless sex I've ever had. I'd almost rather he _hadn't_ enjoyed it so I'd have had an excuse to not continue. Imagine us, if you will. He was spread out on that neatly-made bed as I pounded away at him, my cock twitching with every heartbeat and with him telling me that he wanted it harder, and at one point I looked away to avoid seeing him only to see my clothes scattered on the floor, forming a broken shape vaguely reminiscent of a human being which further reminded me of something I'd been trying for months to forget and _then_ I wanted to throw up. By then I was sweaty and almost insane with the urge to get this over and done with.

The very opposite of catharsis or spiritual enlightenment.

It was then I caught sight of the small square of paper that he'd put on his bedside table. The digits were all there - but the seventh and eighth numbers had been reversed. A variation of a mistake I've made a few times since coming here. After all that fear, all the doubts and the horror and the dread of being found and cornered - after cursing myself for being too innocent to lie - it turned out that I had _actually_ told him the wrong number! The lightheaded, cruel ecstasy I received from his revelation brought on a brief spasm that I _suppose_ counted as an orgasm, and only then was I allowed to move off him at last.

...

He fell asleep quickly. Smiling. Perfectly satisfied, by the looks of it, assured in the belief that we'd do this again.  
I pulled off the condom, cleaned myself up, and left. Didn't even look back as I caught the final bus to Argenteuil.  
I was horribly sick when I got home at last, disgusted by myself, by every memory I have ever had, by the person I had become. Even now I feel nauseous thinking about it, and even though I'm sure he won't be able to find me, my paranoia is at its all-time high. But I brought it all upon myself, so whatever suffering I've earned, I must endure it gladly.

I know for sure you will hate me now.  
It's fine. I hate myself too. It's even ground, it's fair, I've reached equilibrium and that's all it is...

 ~~... oh my god~~  
~~help me, someone please help me~~  
~~I don't fucking know how to fix myself~~

**29 October**

The past twenty-four hours gone in a haze.  
I wept like a child after my confession and have been crying on and off since. My pillow is soaked again. Everything is dark and I have no urge to do anything, not even maintain my own survival; it was only with the greatest reluctance that I ate and drank anything at all. You wouldn't have liked that either, because you were always fussing over me whenever I missed a meal or didn't feel well for whatever reason. You'd have been _grossly_ insulted to see me doing this of my own volition. What can I say, I'm a fucking mess right now.

In my moment of utter helplessness it is you whom my thoughts return to; in the presence of extreme guilt and the thought that I have been _tainted_ in some manner by my actions, I dare not think of romancing you. Instead I search for a parallel memory, for a time when you were just as helpless as I am now, in a vain attempt to see myself in you.  
It's a very old memory, but I manage to locate it with ease, for I'm constantly revisiting aspects of it as it is. When you were thirteen you kept a small white dove in a large cage. A fledgling fallen from the nest, it never quite managed to fly for the entirety of its short life; it could flutter about, and it could jump up and down certain distances, but that was it. Taking pity on the dove, you reared it by hand - and by the time it was fully feathered, it was so tame that it would eat out of your hand and sit on your shoulder all day long. The cage door was perpetually kept open and the dove went back and forth as it wished, though it seemed content to stay in there if you were the one to coax it inside. All spring that dove cooed in your hands, hiding itself under your hair, pecking softly at your fingers, kissing you however it could.

But humans are flawed creatures. Humans _forget_ , and often at the expense of smaller beings.  
One hot summer day you left the cage out in the garden, dove and all, while you cleaned your room. To prevent it from wandering where stray cats or other such creatures could get to it, you kept the cage door closed for once, and went back indoors. A series of tasks and chores came up after it, and in the rush to get everything done, you forgot the cage was there. It was not until I dropped by for a visit - at four o'clock, over six hours after you'd left the cage out - that the dove was remembered.

I had never seen you run so fast. The cage door was wrenched open; seeing that the bird was barely alive, you cried out for water; I, bewildered, was the one who fetched it. You sprinkled water over its feathers, already limp with exhaustion, and begged it to hold on.

But it was too late.  
The dove nuzzled into your hand one last time, before its eyes went glassy; it died so quietly and peacefully that even I had to turn away and wipe my eyes, completely lost for words. But that was nothing compared to you - you were inconsolable. You held that small body in your trembling hands and _wailed_ , holding it first close to your chest then against your cheek, crying at the death of something so young and softly-warm. You cried because you blamed yourself, because this was your first proper insight to what death _meant_ while you were still too young to understand it, because it simply wasn't _fair_. The sun set around us and darkness fell as you sobbed endlessly, the dove's body cooling against your palms; I still remember the words you cried out, in a voice both desperately frightened and _betrayed_ , the very moment I perceived the first star over our heads:

_"I'll never - ever - cage a bird again!"_

I sat next to you and held your hand. You looked up at me, your face stained with tears.  
I tried to keep my voice steady as I whispered: "I'll never cage one either, I promise."

You started crying even harder at that. I tried to embrace you and at first you resisted, pushing weakly at my chest; but eventually you collapsed against me, your arms clutching tightly at my waist. The dove's body lay in front of us as I held you and stroked your hair, hearing your sobs dwindle into faint sniffles and eventually nothing. I remember pressing my cheek against yours to dry your tears; how, when I kissed your forehead and cheeks (an entirely chaste gesture, back then), your tears burned against my lips; how you stayed leaning against me for a long time, shoulders shaking, your grief by then too deep to express in a physical way. We stayed like that for hours, you under my protection - this was far from the first traumatic event we'd experienced individually, but certainly the first sorrow we truly shared together.

...

You became very kind to street pigeons in the years after that.  
Sometimes I saw the shadow of a sad, nostalgic smile on your lips as you reached out to feed them. Flocks of them pecked by your feet at every park and square we went to, even when you had no food at hand. Doubtless they sensed something else that you had to offer: your eternal apology and the kindness of your heart.

**29 October**

I think about that all the time.

\----- **  
**

**02 November**

_samedi répit_  
_plus rire_  
_depuis minuit_  
_jusqu'à minuit_  
_pas pleurer_

**03-05 November**

Since the loss of you, an irritated, cruel _indifference_ towards others has settled in:

Stern-faced businessman encountered at a cafe, located at the fringes of Argenteuil. Teutonic accent, Alsatian or Swiss maybe. He mistakes me for a _garçon_ at first, an error swiftly corrected; by the end of his lunch he has taken a liking to me, and asks offhandedly for my number as he's paying the bill. When rebuffed, he shrugs slightly and says that he'll 'always be here at lunchtime'.  
(I tell him to get back to work and turn away from him.)

A very drunk, smirking youth who corners me in the _discothéque_ ; he offers slurred, generic, but apparently genuine compliments amidst my attempts to excuse myself. Maybe eighteen years old at most. For a moment I think that he might be too inebriated to know who he's really talking to, and that the _actual_ object of his affections must be elsewhere, before he blurts out: "You know, my thing - it's not cut."  
(And I'm meant to care about this - why?)

Handsome young French Algerian spotted outside the library. One foot on the pavement, one foot on the steps; a satchel of books by his feet; expert pipe-smoking. Mouth twisting in a sensual way; his head tilted in the faintly-arrogant manner of a fellow student. He says he'll do whatever I want if I know somewhere to go, eyes filled with kindness and complicity - meaning _I'll fuck you_ , and nothing more.  
(I tell him I'm still looking for somewhere to go and that he can't follow.)

All this to people who at least _mean well_ , and who sincerely want to get to know me, even slightly. I haven't been wronged by any of them - at worst they were somewhat tactless with their approaches, that was all - but they aren't you and that makes their very presence wrong enough for me.

...

Every single one of them was refused, by the way.  
I don't think that I'll be subjecting myself to the will of strangers for a while.

(I write this on the fifth. All encounters took place between the above dates.)

**06/ ~~07/08~~ November (?)**

'I suffer from my best friend's death.'

**08 November**

_Escape me?_  
_Never -_  
_Beloved!_  
_While I am I, and you are you,_  
_So long as the world contains us both,_  
_Me the loving and you the loath,_  
_While the one eludes, must the other pursue._  
_My life is a fault at last, I fear:_  
_It seems too much like a fate, indeed!_  
_Though I do my best I shall scarce succeed._  
_But what if I fail of my purpose here?_  
_It is but to keep the nerves at strain,_  
_To dry one's eyes and laugh at a fall,_  
_And, baffled, get up and begin again -_  
_So the chase takes up one's life, that's all._  
_While, look but once from your farthest bound_  
_At me so deep in the dust and dark,_  
_No sooner the old hope goes to ground_  
_Than a new one, straight to the self-same mark,_  
_I shape me -_  
_Ever_  
_Removed!_

\- From Browning.

**08 November**

I think the above needs more detail. It's not a mere vague reference - we actually _learnt_ about this.  
I don't know if you'd remember it from Carnot, but well. Here goes nothing.

Do you remember our foreign literature lessons, and the beautiful English pair whom we learnt about during one sunny winter morning? The Brownings - the man and woman who actually fell in love through each other's poems, so much that they eventually eloped to Italy to live out their lives together? I'd known something about their love story before, but how different it is to actually retrace its progress through their poetry - their actual questions and replies to each other, spanning all of the years they were married!

Thanks to this discovery I managed to spend the afternoon lost in a pleasant reverie, in my corner of the library with dusty sunlight drifting in, watching the lazy waters of the Seine flow amidst the slow-falling leaves.  
Imagining us on the run together.  
Ending up in Italy (like them) or somewhere lovely, dark and deep, like the German forests.  
_Creating_ together, even if not poetry, or any kind of writing at all. Our lives quiet, surrounded with essential beauty.  
You my Elizabeth Barrett and I your Robert Browning - down to your gentle aloofness and my uxorious, persistent longing.  
Down to the very part where you would have left before me.

(But, granted, never with so much sorrow and regret as now.)

**09 November**

Three excerpts:

_'... worry about me, I'm doing fine. I miss you and my piano and all my friends and dearly wish that you were closer to me. But at the same time, I think I needed this period of being away. I've felt better after a month here, who knows what the next few months will bring? Over the past couple of days I had a strange feeling behind my forehead, that of a sensation that wasn't quite an ache. I think that it must have been the beginnings of a cold. I was careful to rest in with plenty of tea and warmth, so I'm sure I'll be okay. That's the only time I've felt off during the past two weeks. Other than that I've been well, and I daresay, quite content. The people here are kind and I'm not wanting for anything in particular, though I would always appreciate more letters from home! Around early December I'll be mailing a package back to you with items I no longer need or were all opened a long time ago, please keep it safe in my room for me. And please give grandmère and grandpère my love...'_

_'... since I arrived here I miss a very particular kind of small pleasure. The flea market in Montmartre sells it amidst their marmalade and jam - so easily obtainable there yet utterly unknown here, less than twenty kilometres away. You know the one, jarred with a red-checked lid and wrapped with twine just above the label. Warming up a slice of bread and drizzling its golden goodness upon the surface, stirring it into tea or hot chocolate... ah, what a pity! I lament the loss of that one familiar comfort dearly. But yes, returning to the point, the two of us must meet sometime. I'll come to you. During the past week I've let the place go somewhat; I can't subject you to such a sight, the thought of spending our precious time together merely cleaning (or being consciously aware that cleaning needs doing) is a hard one to stomach, and besides it could be the last time I'll get to be in Paris for a while, depending on how things go. (I should think I'd be able to drop by sometime in December as well, but that's providing that I am still in Argenteuil or somewhere nearby. Right now, it's likely that I will be.) Not so sure about the date, but maybe sometime between the twenty-fifth and twenty-eighth, if you could reply or call me at some point...'_

_'... and I swear to God, I am trying to resume my life as it was a year ago. I'm not in this state of mind because I actively don't want to improve, or anything. I am trying to learn how to cope before anyone prescribes me a cure or can tell me to just move on already, and that part is what is hardest. I already don't feel as if my parents let me go on this journey with their genuine support (as in, I believe they may have agreed against their will, out of the idea that I would do something drastic otherwise), nor do I think that anyone but you actually believes that I will stick it out for an entire year. Not that I desire to be wandering in misery for the whole year, of course - I do want to be better - but I feel as if they want me to come back prematurely, lugging my shame and sorrow behind me as if this wanderjahr has meant nothing, just so that they can suffocate me in their attempts to care. It has taken me this long to recognize how much I dislike being coddled, though I've admittedly grown up with it and know little else. But your brother - he would never have stood for such treatment. What I mistook once as his coldness was actually a comfortable, self-asserted independence that he already possessed and wished to impart upon me. He was never afraid to tell me that something was wrong with my conduct, or that he didn't approve of my plans. He was never afraid to tell me no, which is probably why I cannot forget him, try as I might; nobody has said no to me since, even when they really should have. I can only hope that the world has no shortage of such people...'_

In presented order - Maman/Papa, Laurent, Paul.

**11 November**

Walking in a sea of blue cornflowers; it is Remembrance Day.  
Instead of visiting my usual spots, I have been wandering aimlessly around the place. For this one day, everyone is solemn, and almost required to be so. Even artificial grief is _grief_ in a comprehensible, shared sense, and I vaguely enjoy being immersed in it; today, I don't feel as lost and alone in my own tragedy as I usually am. I remember how you and I made a ritual out of buying the _bleuets_ together, always in school, never less than a week before the actual date. We'd pin them to our coats together and take them off together at the end of the day. As far as I can recall, this was not necessarily done with the war dead in mind; it was a ritual driven mostly by the sense of doing what was expected and correct, and maybe some boyish whimsy. Perhaps that made what we did disrespectful and despicable in the eyes of others, but I do not think that it ever was.

This year none of that fueled my purchase of the _bleuet_ , yet I feel less qualified to wear it than ever before, this flower that means _timid innocence_ and _delicacy_...

**11 November**

I've been planning to visit your grave for a couple of weeks now, though little has come of those plans so far. I didn't know when your parents would be there, for one. According to your brother they've been visiting you more frequently. The one date I thought would be ideal turned out to be one of the times your parents would be there; Paul informed me of this by a letter that reached me not even two days before I'd have gone. I just barely missed them. With my plans for the month derailed all I could do was to wait until November and pick a date when I was sure that I wouldn't encounter anybody familiar.

Seeing the memorial service and the abundance of flowers around this commune inspired me to finally set a date - something practical has finally come of my angst. I will go to see you on the eighteenth. Wait for me.

**11 November**

Pasta for dinner. Simple and effortless. Good at comforting.

**12 November**

...

I think it is time to leave Argenteuil.

It is ironic that I wish to drive myself out of this place, not because of the sordid encounters and difficult times that I had here, but because someone has shown me _care_. When I walked into the liquor store this morning, the lady at the counter stood up and greeted me cheerfully; she said she was worried about me because she hadn't seen me the day before. It wasn't until I left the shop with two bottles of vodka in hand that the implications of that sunk in, and from that very moment I began shaking so badly that I nearly dropped the bottles on the pavement. Even now, back in my room, I haven't touched them since putting them in a little-visited corner. I cannot allow this to continue, drifting through a haze of various drugs and liquor and forgettable experiences, until the day I wake up and can no longer remember who I was before all of this happened - until I lose my identity as _Thomas Bangalter._

This is not what you sacrificed yourself for.

What have I become?

**15 November**

Just today I have managed to trade away the two bottles of vodka for two litres of pomegranate juice (hard to obtain here for some reason) and some pens. One man's essentials for another - he will get more enjoyment out of them than I would have, I'm sure. The past few days I have been cleaning up my room to see what I should pack and what I can throw away, and I've been putting some thought into where I can go next. I have all of France ahead of me, after all, and maybe even a few neighbouring countries. I doubt my family would be too worried if I turned up at Mons, for example, that's not _too_ unreasonable a place to go.

But I don't think I will go that far. If I reach out too far, too quickly, I will lose the illusion of distancing myself little by little.

Hmm.

_(evening)_

The lack of alcohol is beginning to hit me somewhat. This was expected. I need to take up another vice.  
Not cigarettes - not losing myself in strangers - is there such a thing as a _non-addictive, non-manipulative, personal_ vice?

_(afternoon)_

Did not sleep all night. Frantically writing letters, three more of them, none of which I have finished.

I haven't eaten in... a day now, I think? Should I fix this?

...

But I can't think of a recipe...

_(afternoon)_

Nantes.

**18 November**

Heavy rain. Took the train to the cemetery at eleven fourteen. It was already pouring it down when I stepped on the train and took my seat; this state of affairs still hasn't changed, even though I've been back for quite some hours. It's five past five in the afternoon and the skies are already dark outside. There's a _hachis Parmentier_ baking slowly in the oven - shameless comfort food to ease the heaviness in my heart. I spent the past few hours listlessly staring outside, watching the rain trace endless paths like tears down the windowpane and out of sight. Call it a kind of wistfulness.

I couldn't take a full bouquet of flowers like I'd originally wanted because it was raining so much. They'd have been ruined long before I even reached you. I settled for a single, long-stalked, pure white lily encased in a clear plastic box and wrapped with a gold ribbon; that would have held off the rain fairly well, and it wasn't so large a tribute that anyone would later have trouble clearing it up. (A morbid thought; I don't think I could take watching someone else remove those tributes. I know that they have to be cleared eventually, though the officials do allow for a very long period of time for any flowers and fresh offerings to dilapidate. All I'm saying is that I don't want to watch, it feels like a _violation_.) The front of the grave was clean and gleaming wetly as I laid the flower down, straightened up, and stared at the engraved name and date. I thought then that you had remained so beautifully constant while I had changed so much, and not for the better; it wasn't fair, but then what's _fairness_ between the two of us now? You can't own or give up anything anymore. This is nothing like the boyish spats we used to have about who got what last, because it turned out there _was_ an answer to that after all, and it turned out to be me when I really hadn't ever wanted it to be so.

...

The letters on the headstone were brighter than ever. Not a single speck of rust or a hint of tarnish.  
The rain had washed the headstone clean and it looked beautiful - as _good as new_. Just the sight of it transported me instantly back to a different time, over three seasons ago, to that day when I watched you being lowered into the ground. The day when my endless episodes of tears started, and the day this diary was begun, containing really a lifelong _soliloquy_ without rhyme or reason (for there is no one left to listen to me) - the day when they tore you away from me to lie in that earth forever.

...

Old sorrow is supposed to be graceful, isn't it? Precisely because it's old and one is expected to have come to terms with it?  
Maybe a sigh, or a hasty glance at the skies overhead - maybe the umbrella adjusted to hide one's eyes as one turns around and walks away, or even a lone tear sliding down one's cheek, pure and perfect, to express the utter tragedy of the situation? Because I think that that's an unreasonable thing to expect. I always did, but today I felt it the hardest. Perhaps I'm some kind of freakish exception, but regardless of if I am or not, the fact remains that I cannot be expected to be graceful alongside dealing with your loss. It was the sighs that came first, soft to begin with but eventually turning into harsh, painful gasps that wracked my body; air forced itself out in roughened breaths and some kind of _hardness_ settled in my chest, stabbing, burning, so painful that I had to clap a hand over my mouth to muffle the sound of myself choking on my sobs. I knew not by then whether it was the rain blinding my gaze or something else, but I knew that it hurt everywhere and that by the end I was almost _welcoming_ of it, as if the grief was an old friend who sat perched jovially atop that headstone as if to say: _horrible weather, isn't it, eh, Thomas? You might want to sit down for this one, or at least go to a nearby cafe or something, because I'm going to be a long time and you'd be better off riding this one out somewhere nice and comfortable._

I bit my lip. Then I decided to hell with grace, because no one keeps their manners in the face of raw tragedy.  
I threw down my umbrella and cried. No one else was nearby, the rain had cleared out the mourners thoroughly; I was truly left alone in my sorrow, free to weep as loudly as I wanted. This wasn't the red-eyed, brimming, hastily wiped off and _silent_ tears that I've had to deal with for the past few months - all those clichéd descriptions in literature of a 'howl of grief' are not actually that far off the mark. Because that was basically what it was. No one was around to hear, so I could be as loud as I wanted. I sank onto my knees, right onto the cold damp stone that marked out the length of your grave; I clenched my fingers against that unyielding surface, so hard that I earned myself a scrape on the side of my right palm; no one heard me slam my fists against that hard surface and _scream_ , neither catharsis nor solution in mind, a single desperate outcry that was drowned out by the rain.

No other beast on earth would have been as piteous.  
Maybe. I don't know. I'm not fishing for sympathy here - best to avoid comments of the above sort altogether.

...

When I left the cemetery I was soaked through and miserable, though very calm. (It wasn't the _peaceful_ sort of calm - more like a blankness to mask the hurt.) I stopped by a nearby cafe, through more to collect my thoughts and pull myself together rather than out of a genuine urge to eat or drink anything. The cafe was empty for most part; my appearance thankfully raised no eyebrow, nor did it invoke overt sympathy from the staff. They must be used to receiving customers who've just come from a place of mourning and have become accordingly dishevelled in response. Inevitable, considering where they're located.

The coffee was nice. Very strong.  
My voice was steadier than when I'd entered, too, when I asked for the bill. The waiter gave me a kind smile.

...

My clothes are drying on the radiator now. I've replaced them with nothing.  
That's right. I'm naked as the day I was born. There's only a blanket over my body at the moment, though I think I am dry and warm enough. I haven't showered off yet because the sweet, musty petrichor from your grave is still clinging to my skin. It's from you, so I'll gladly take it.

...

... I should go and check up on my dinner.

~~**20 November** ~~

~~Watched the newest Tarantino while I was in town  
Had to walk out during the car chase because I could see the crash coming miles away and I just~~

**21 November**

The worst part about your absence is the way it's made the rest of my life about that one night.

**22 November**

Reminder:  
Send back the following items to Paris: _The Diary of Anaïs Nin, The Fall, Malina_ , autumn clothes, collected letters, shoes.  
Groceries: juice/rice/minced beef/potatoes/milk/onions/flour (watch out for amount/size).  
Complete letters.  
Look into potentially seeing a doctor/therapist at Nantes (make arrangements if possible).  
Collect prescription.

**22 November**

I wonder if you'd have been worried about all this mention of doctors and pills and therapists. I think you'd have been.  
But that's okay. I'm the one who's actually taking the pills and I'm worried about it too, all the time.

I picked up enough to last me until the end of November when I left. I haven't had cause to visit a doctor in Argenteuil, but I'm in possession of several prescriptions that I can collect anywhere once my supply runs out. Never all at once, and I simply _cannot_ miss the date for any of those. If I'm late by even a day, I'll have to go through a longer process to obtain what I need, and I simply don't have the energy to pursue that kind of thing. But whether the pills are working, that I don't know. I don't feel that they are. They take up to six weeks to have any effect, I heard, but I still feel that nothing has changed. Besides, I'm wondering if I ought to be re-evaluated altogether in Nantes, though I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

When I first received the antidepressants, the doctor told me to begin right away. 50mg per day, a single tablet taken before bed. He told me that I had to _absolutely_ make sure that I wasn't taking them on an empty stomach, and that I ought not to mix them with alcohol, amidst other such warnings. It's probably why I have fixated so heavily on _dinners_ out of all the meals in a day, ever since I came to Argenteuil, because that meal is the safeguard against me and the pill. But I'm off-topic again. Pills. Yes. When I first received them and came home with them I just laid them out in a row on my desk and cried for a very long time, sitting with my knees pressed against my chest, though I certainly wasn't crying because of you for once. I don't even think that I was sad about anything - in fact, at least half of me was immensely _relieved_ that a solution to my misery had been found at last. I don't enjoy being this way, after all. But I was also aware that this was something that _changed_ an essential part of myself. Despite knowing how wrong it was to regard my sickness in that way, I couldn't help but think something along the lines of _this is it, I'm officially a crazy person now, someone who needs to be held up by medication just to go through daily life_ \- and both my ignorance and my resentful disbelief broke through in the only _benign_ way that I knew of. Tears, all over again.

I have cried enough for a lifetime over this one event, and even now I am startled by _how different_ each episode feels, every time.

I can only pray that there is a limit to all of this.

**23 November**

A return to September.

Potential Side Effects:  
Insomnia (Yes.)  
Anxiety (Yes.)  
~~Dizziness~~ (No.)  
~~Anorexia~~ (More the urge to _work it off_ than the urge to starve,)  
~~Weight gain~~ (Quite the opposite.)  
~~Lack of sex drive~~ (See above.)  
Suicidal ideation (...)

**25 November**

I lost ten kilograms and I haven't disappeared enough yet

**27 November**

First mourning: _false_ liberty -  
always a sense of guilt prickling at the edges of your occasional joy.

Second mourning: _desolate_ liberty -  
vast, empty, disastrous. Liberated without worthy occupation, and aware of it.

**28 November**

Saw Laurent today; a ride back to Paris, to that strange and welcoming territory. I felt like a different person stepping out into what used to be my entire world, and judging from the way Laurent looked at me as we met on the platform, he could sense that something had changed, too. But I believe that he interpreted it as a _good_ change. Why, I don't exactly know - perhaps he told me that I looked good as a pure matter of politeness, or I really am good at concealing my woes, though I don't feel that I am most of the time.

I caught a look at my reflection against the window as we left the station. Much thinner than before I left Paris, but hardly skeletal. A little expressionless, certainly not happy, but calm and relatively peaceful-looking. The mask I have formed must be a good one, I admit. I've had plenty of practice.

We went over to his house and he treated me to a nice meal. It was comfortable to just sit and talk with him, and it was natural between us that he did most of the talking, for it was I who needed to be updated on the affairs of more people. Laurent himself seems to be doing well. He's caught the eye of a new, up-and-coming band, and he waited for me to come along to give them an answer as to whether he was interested in joining. (I told him to go for it, of course.) He asked me once if I intended to visit my parents - I had to say no, but also added that this wouldn't be news to them, either. I had insisted firmly on letters and phone calls as the sole communication between us.

Laurent tilted his head a little at that, giving me some impenetrable look. Confused. Saddened, almost.

(Just like the way you looked at me that night.)

...

He saw me off when evening fell and I had to go back to Argenteuil. I left him with my well-wishes and the request to send my love to all our friends; he left me with _his_ well-wishes and two small jars of honey, you know the one, off that stall at the flea market in Montmartre. I'd missed that particular honey greatly during my time here. They're sitting atop my desk now, two gleaming cat's eyes, and looking at the sunlight reflecting off them - splashing the wall a light gold - soothes me a little. I am to leave for Nantes as soon as December comes, so I am determined to make the rest of my stay a pleasant one, filled with memories like those - no matter how small they might be.

Dinner is fried bread with drizzled honey. Another childhood comfort...

**29 November**

_Ah! Wie wunderbar,_  
_Nichts ist so wie-es-war,_  
_Durch ein winziges wort: 'Heirat'._  
_Aus dem erdgeschoss_  
_Wird ein marchenschloss_  
_Durch ein winziges wort: 'Heirat'._

Imagine the scene:  
First snow upon the ground. A tailor's shop located next to a department store. Greta Keller's low, dulcet voice singing a showtune, drifting quietly and enchantingly from the speakers. A young Parisian standing outside, quite taken aback by the coincidental, simultaneous occurrence of all of those things. Why at a tailor's, why _this_ Parisian in particular, why Greta Keller - why the _snow_ , for the first time this winter, right _there_ and then?

Good song, that. Do you remember the first time we watched _Cabaret_?I like to think that we were always musical people, but that one was the first we watched together that you reacted to with wide-eyed, powerful shock - and which also led to one of my many fascinations with you. I always intended to look out for the actual musical, in the hopes that we would go together - but, well. That was then. Strange to hear a song from it there. Strange, but not inappropriate. I was interested enough to venture closer, and I saw immediately that it was a _wedding_ shop, catering to men's suits and tuxedos specifically. Modest and not overly fancy, quite unlike the more snobbish places (sadly found everywhere), but still possessing a gentle, classic charm.

So I went inside.  
I was greeted politely; I returned the greeting in kind, then I was left alone to browse. I intended to leave after a cursory walk around the place, but within a minute or two something caught my eye; a slim-cut tuxedo, black all over and complete with bowtie and pocket square. Again, not the most fancy tuxedo. Standard style, really. And yet, I couldn't look away from it. It was exactly my size, and I had indirectly entertained _something_ like this in my thoughts recently, along with the doubt that...

...

I...

I wanted to know what it felt like to wear one, just once.

...

I wanted to feel the exact fabric upon my skin. It was nothing like any other suit I'd ever worn before.  
(I swear that there is something _different_ about wedding tuxedos. It was not just my mood.)  
I wanted to tie my own tie and get it right the first time, the knot teasingly loose, unravelled with a single tug.  
I wanted to grasp an anticipation never experienced - dressing up for the sheer purpose of being _undressed_ and ravished.  
All those shirts folded without creases, the ties knotted at perfect length, the tight-fitting garments that conceal under the pretense of _protecting_ something sacred - the aesthetic conspiracy of marriage. For there is something conspiratorial about it. Who in a wedding party _doesn't_ know what's going to happen later in the couple's bedchambers, save for perhaps the children and the particularly naive? Yet at the same time, who other than the most crude-mannered ever comments on this knowledge? - no one, and when such a comment is made, everyone becomes _genuinely_ embarrassed and chides the one responsible for speaking what was still an accepted truth. This is considered the correct response to such _heckling_ \- as most would put it - yet fundamentally, the scolding comes from an insincere place. It is true, certainly, that some couples do not consummate their marriage, and that there is never a guarantee that a wedding night will go smoothly. (I'd be surprised if most of them went well, to be honest.) At the risk of sounding shamelessly Barthesian, there is nothing _natural_ about the assumption that the wedded couple will make love that night - but it is a _culturally expected_ truth. And we all know it to be so. The silence surrounding this truth rivals no other conspiracy out there in its sheer breadth and effect.

I spoke nothing of this to the assistants in the shop. They were very helpful and kind, too, which I appreciated greatly. When I was fully dressed they asked me if I wanted a photograph; I asked whether that was a standard procedure and they said they could make it that way, just for me. They were sharp-eyed, all of them. I hadn't given them a motivation beyond simply wanting to try on a tuxedo, but I think they understood.  
And here's the photograph to show for it. I will not look upon it much, I imagine, but it's a souvenir I'm glad to have.

...

Speaking of _motivations_. Just so you know.  
I did not do any of this out of some obsessive certainty that I would have married _you_ , had you lived. The very existence of that fantasy was certainly a part of it, but I wasn't trying to _enact_ it in any way. To be quite honest, that particular fantasy is a _very_ uneasy one even now, only accessed during my most poignant moments of sorrow - I don't think it would have been all that likely, even if you _had_ been by my side and even if we _had_ been a couple. No, what drove me to all of this was something of a vastly more urgent and serious nature. I feel as if I will... _never achieve this_ , if that makes sense? And that I was perhaps never cut out for it, completely independent from the existence or non-existence of you. By trying on that suit I was compensating for _something_ , but that something wasn't a _lost quality_ of any kind - rather something that I never even had to begin with. I hesitate to describe it as an _imperfection_ , because not enjoying a marriage is in no way an indication that something is inherently wrong with you, but for now I have no other word. An imperfection that prevents me from being bound to another in such a manner - superficially, I like the idea of being married and going through all the social rituals. Realistically, I'm neither mature nor prepared enough, and I feel like I would eventually find it to be quite boring.

Again, this is not an inherent fault - but to fantasize about such things so blatantly, and with someone who I so desperately loved (and still love) yet who never even gave his consent - it's a tad _shallow_ , isn't it? Does that make me a bad person?

I don't know.

I do a lot of things that I'm proud of, and a lot of things that I regret. Some things I do are unclassifiable in such a manner. I'm still undecided on whether this was a regretful experience or something else altogether, but the fact remains that I went through it, and so I come to my day's conclusion: I must be content in the choices that I have already made. We shall continue to exist together in this unlikely quartet, then - me and this photograph of myself on one end, you and Greta Keller on the other. It was the two of you who pushed us into this state of imperfection, after all.

 _Und dann steht man da,_  
_Sagt beseligt "ja";_  
_Heute wird mein Traum_  
_Endlich wirklich wahr..._

**30 November**

Sent off a letter today.  
I barely remember what I wrote in it, but it was probably something consolatory. I move onto Nantes tomorrow.  
Something is lacking in my life, something parental this time - but I must get used to it, _non?_

It is what being an adult is like.

Reminder:  
Buy more stamps.  
Laurent first, then your brother, then family again (letters).  
Number pages whenever possible.  
Make lunch for the train journey. (Or buy at the station? Take an apple in case.)

**30 November**

Most of my necessities are packed now. Thank goodness I only ever bought the small size for everything, I've been able to use up all the dishwashing soap, detergent and such in the past ten or so weeks. I always liked making a clean break of things. Now that I am thinking properly of leaving I feel kind of relaxed again; of course there is anticipation like a small, hard, well-polished stone sitting in the depths of my stomach, but I can't say that this is an unpleasant feeling. It's a feeling that invites _action_ \- something that I am in desperate need of - and by tomorrow evening I will have quelled any unpleasantness arising from it.

Strange to think I am leaving this place. I will likely never return to this exact apartment again in my lifetime. So - even though it's a strange time to make the invitation - what do you say to another literary sketch of the apartment? A _proper_ one, with all the visuals.  
You know, just to keep the memory alive? This place was home for two months of my life, after all. It won't take very long.

...

The apartment is small but very liveable.  
Enter through the front door; right away one faces with two doors, one sliding glass, and the other, simple white-painted wood. The latter leads into a bathroom; tiled, well-equipped and clean, with steel towel racks, mirrored cabinets and a bath with a shower attachment. The vinyl curtain can be drawn around it if one wants a shower, though I much prefer taking a nice long soak. Water pressure's fine, though it could stand to be stronger. In the medicine cabinet I keep my spare towels, shaving oil, shaving cream, leftover plastic bags with the remains of snuff still caked in it, and a first-aid kit. The towels are kept in a shelf above it. Toothbrush and toothpaste by the sink, shampoo and conditioner perched along the side of the bath/wall, and I know that my razor must be atop either the toilet tank or the washing machine. It’s a fine razor, but when this entry ends I'll probably go back and stuff that out of sight in the cabinet so I don't get any strange ideas. That's all that can be said about the bathroom.

Now for the actual apartment itself. Push the sliding door to the right and you immediately see nearly all there is to the see; to the left is a large bed, queen size and very comfortable. The mattress is neither too hard nor too soft, and quite unlike what I expected, I think it must be new. The pillows are feather-stuffed and very plump, so much that I only need one beneath my head when I sleep. I prefer two usually. By the bedside table there is a lamp that doesn't work, though I've never had cause to use it, and I usually put my wristwatch, this diary and whatever pen I'm using atop it. Those three items are first things I reach out for when I wake up in the morning, just to see that everything is still there, and that my world is still as I know it. There's a large corner gap between the table, the wall and the wardrobe, and that is where I have stashed my suitcase, alongside the ironing board, a small broom and a mop. (I'll spare you the details of the wardrobe - it's uninteresting and empty, I've packed most everything in it away.) On the other side of the bed I have nothing save for the large windows and the curtains - I usually keep the latter closed nowadays - and I don't sleep on that side of the bed either, wanting to give myself the illusion of - _something_. For the sofa and the desk one needs to venture towards the other side of the room altogether. I call it a desk because that's what I mainly use it for, but it really doubles as a dining table. It's nothing special, though the chairs that come with it are comfortable enough. Right now there are a few books on it, the picture of you from March (I brought it, frame and all, with me), a knife and fork in anticipation of a very satisfactory dinner (stroganoff/pasta/grapes for dessert) and a half-finished bottle of orange juice. I did mention before that the sofa was hard, and this is still true, though I do not begrudge anyone for this. What I haven't mentioned is that it's a large sofa, comfortably accommodating even my height - and I am not a short man by any definition. I like the colour too, a fetching slategrey-blue. It's good to fall asleep on during the day, though I have no comforter or blanket and therefore cannot manage at night. I have occasionally passed out on it while drunk in the middle of the night, only to wake up shivering. It's also very good for holding onto when you're bent over it or bending someone else over it, though I tend to find it rather _unceremonious_ when that happens. That is the general breadth of what constitutes the main room of the apartment.

What remains, I suppose, is the kitchenette. This takes the form of a small alcove and an open doorway. There's a gas stove/grill/oven combination, though the flames are somewhat slow for my liking (though strong, once I've gotten it going). The counter is large enough. The fridge is small, but as I am only one person, it's never overflowing with anything in particular. The freezer section is too small, so I haven't had a chance to indulge much in ice cream or other such delights, though ice trays always come out beautifully. I've emptied out most of the fridge in preparation for my departure tomorrow, so there isn't much left in there: a bottle of milk, two eggs, an éclair I bought on a whim today, and when I put the juice bottle back that'll be in there, too. I've made many pleasant meals in this kitchen, including hopefully the stroganoff I have left to simmer on the top-left part of the stove - and as that concludes the general observations of this entry, I better rush in and check that before it burns. All very ordinary and domestic, picture-perfect almost.

Ah, but of course!  
You're never coming back.

\----- **  
**

**01 December**

Afternoon. I am currently at Montparnasse Station, waiting for the train to take me to my next destination.  
Feels strange being back here again.

Have I mentioned how I got hold of the apartment I'm going to? I don't think that I have. When I first decided to leave Argenteuil, I was fairly sure that I'd have to spend a couple of weeks in a hotel when I arrived at Nantes. It's holiday season and I couldn't imagine that I could get a decent place with such little notice. Fortunately, I was blessed with a father who first and foremost _knows other people_ , due to the nature of his work - in other words, Papa knows _where to get things._ He's been such a great help that way. It turned out that he knew someone who'd be absent from the city for a couple of months - I distinctly remember being told that he was a guitarist and that he was away in Germany - and together they arranged for me to stay temporarily in their apartment. It's located in the completely opposite direction from where I was expecting to end up, but one doesn't complain about such conditions. Besides, what does 'where I'd expected to end up' even mean in a city I have never been in? Not much, I assume. I'll get used to it.

...

Paris felt deeply foreign to me three days ago, when I visited Laurent.  
Today I feel even more alienated, likely because I am only stopping by as opposed to properly visiting.  
The moment I set foot in the station I thought of home and you but I shook it off.

...

And there's my train.  
Two hours and twenty minutes until Nantes.

**01 December**

This apartment is very...

...

_modern._

...

I don't mean this badly, I just wasn't expecting it. The apartment at Argenteuil was simple and immediately homelike; I feel like an intruder in this one. Probably because it's not officially being let out in the first place. This place is already well-loved by someone _else_ , instead of being anonymously spick and span - instead of willing to cater to _anyone_ who stops by. I think this place is as big, if not bigger, than the apartment in Argenteuil; I can't really tell, though, there are more _things_ here that take up space.

It is prettier than the other place, and the view's amazing, I can grant it that...

...

I should unpack properly. Put the suitcase away for another rainy day.  
Home is where the luggage isn't.

_(evening)_

Settled in once again. I used the list from September as reference for groceries and other such things. It was easier this time.  
The first thing I did after opening my suitcase was to take out your picture and wander around, trying to find a place for you. That was the first thing I did at Argenteuil, too. There's a proper writing desk in this apartment, with enough space for a picture frame - but for now I have set you upon the bedside table, so that I can look at you every morning and night. Once you were safely settled, most everything else fell into place, too. Now that I've had a close look around the apartment again I'm finding more things that endear me to it. For one, this place has a turntable and plenty of records to go with them - not really the kind of things I'd listen to, and of course the presence of those things mean that I have to be very careful from now on. (I don't want to break anything now, do I?) But now I have music back with me, and I'd be only too glad to put this turntable to good use. I recognize a Serge Gainsbourg record, as well as a couple of Kraftwerk ones (familiar to me; bizarrely out of place in this collection), and a Bill Evans. They'll keep me company tonight.

_(2nd / 10:37 PM)_

Just got back from my first night out in the city.  
Found another dealer. Elated.  
I _think_ he does pills  
Didn't ask. Not what I got anyway.

Pardon, I'm the nice kind of giddy at the moment  
I've got lots to tell you but I'll save it for later

_(3:30 AM)_

Passed out right after that entry. I'm surprised I was _that_ coherent, if I'm honest.

I said I had lots to tell you, didn't I? And that I would get to it when I was awake. Now's as good a time as any. My mind is very clear and I am not _unpleasantly_ awake at the moment. This cup of coffee next to me is the only thing I've so far made in the kitchen in this apartment; despite there being plenty of food in the fridge, I haven't felt like cooking any of it since I arrived here. I ate all my meals in different locations around the city, which I'll jot down here, just for _substance:_

Dinner (01st): in the cafe right next to the grocer's, _before_ I did my food shopping. They served a particularly acrid robusta that I wasn't convinced by, though they had a decent veal ragout - _decent_ , though nothing to rave about. It was filling, though, that I will grant. I might return to see if they do better with lunch menus.  
Skipped breakfast on the 02nd.  
Lunch (02nd): a bistro not too far away from the apartment. Tried the poached scallops and was very pleased with the result; good wine selection as well. Very friendly owner, the food is excellent though a little expensive. I think I'll be visiting this place again, though I won't be able to go _often._  
Dinner (02nd): Street food. Freshly shaved döner kebab in warm pita bread with a side of salad; somehow even better than the one I used to have in Argenteuil, despite it being without sauce. I almost want to make it a goal to get one from every town and city I end up in, just to compare.

Oh, as for _this_ coffee? It's good. Dark and bittersweet. I don't know why I ever accepted cream or any other flavourings in it before.

Anyway.

I am a city boy and Nantes is a city. Not the largest city, but then I think as a Parisian my definition of what constitutes a _city_ may be a little skewed. Paris is its own beast altogether, large and sprawling, the people in it as varied as they would be in a small country. Even though I consider myself rather shamelessly urbanite (shown in the choice I made to withdraw to _Argenteuil_ and not the quieter towns beyond that point), a place as vast as that can be intimidating if one isn't in the right mood. And I haven't been in the right mood for Paris for a long time, now. Nantes, though - Nantes suits me fine. I feel sufficiently distracted _and_ anonymous. Now that I am reflecting back on my time in Argenteuil, if I had stayed for December and beyond, I'd have become a _recognized_ presence; newcomers eventually stop being new to an area, and one-night stands can only be effective as long as you're sure that you will not encounter each other again. I was beginning to develop a recognition towards certain individuals, and had even entertained some of them in my apartment more than once. I wouldn't have been able to go on like that. Here I have regained all I left behind in Paris, except on a _smaller_ , more comfortable scale, alongside all the gentleness that I developed an appreciation for in Argenteuil. Many clubs and cafes to stop by without ever becoming a regular; a library larger (but from what I've seen, not any less quiet) than the one in Argenteuil; beautiful young men and women everywhere, all just as anonymous as myself, delicious food and blissful isolation.

That's all the optimism I will spare for now. I am keeping to the promise I made in late September. I shouldn't get overexcited.

So I met that drug dealer last night. I wanted to check up on the music scene of Nantes, so yesterday I walked into the first club that accepted me, without knowing what I was in for. But really, from that point, it was a straightforward path towards that dealer; clubs and drugs just go together no matter what. No comments about me being new blood this time. I suppose in a city atmosphere there's no point in noticing things like those, for people come and go all the time. I was there for a good time and he was happy to provide it, that was all.

Might as well admit it in plain words. I'm well and truly back to doing drugs. Yes, I know this is against your memory.  
Am I sorry? Yes, but probably not enough to give it up again, not yet.

It's a terrible thing to say, but again, better out than in: I have secretly resented the lack of drugs in my life since you have been gone. They led to your loss, which might seem reason enough to never touch a pill or do a line again as long as I live - but I never blamed the _drugs_. That's nonsensical. Drugs just _sit_ there until they're dealt or taken. No, I blame myself, and even then not because of the ecstasy - I blame myself for not having listened to you for the entirety of the night. Even through my drugged-up state I understood you telling me _certain_ things, and my disobedience to those things was deliberate. It was I who gambled on the consequences, fully aware of what could happen if I lost horribly, and I still went ahead and did it anyway. And to manage the weight of my blame I have needed drugs more than ever. There is nothing inherently immoral about chemical dependency; every civilization on earth has pursued drugs and other such substances, because as far as humans have existed, life has been terrible for a lot of people. Decriminalize drugs is what I'm saying, so addictions can be managed in a civil manner and no unnecessary lives are ever lost because of them.

...

The point is, I need the drugs. _Something_ to keep me going.

Maybe that nightmare in May really _was_ trying to tell me something.

...

What else? Ah, yes. Meeting the dealer was the high point of last night, really. I didn't take the drugs there, nor do I think that I chose a _good_ venue to gauge the music scene of Nantes as I originally intended. I left early and went to a nearby Irish pub instead, simply to have a drink and relax. I had no intention of picking up anyone, not before I'd gotten comfortable with my apartment; true to that determination, when I left I was alone. But I left prematurely and rather against my will for what was really quite a petty reason; I saw two men exchange a smile in passing while I was in that pub, one reaching out to pat and squeeze the other's shoulder, and that _one_ simple gesture made me want to retreat to the furthest edges of the world. The love that other human beings feel for each other tortures me. For such smiles and glances exchanged by such men - and sometimes their words, though I would not consider them to be always as artful - are the subtlest emanation of a ray of love coming from the heart of each. I know from one-sided experience that this is a very _soft_ light to possess, delicate and wound up very tightly when not publicly showing (and it is so very seldom on show, not in front of all _those_ people). A spun ray of love.

To think that I once possessed such sweet delicacy too - I, with all my faults, my cruel indifference and selfish nature! Ah, yes, to think that I was once capable of weaving a fine thread of that precious, chaste substance known as love, the unlikely product of so inelegant a smithy as our respective bodies. Mine is tall and slim, nowadays quite frail with little in the way of strength; your frame was smaller than average and I would never have called you the _handsomest_ of men, though you were strong and tightly-muscled enough. We weren't stunning to look at, but we were nice enough. Looking back on it, my love was an imperfect love to have woven, for your body was more a secret _inspiration_ than an active aid to its production. But even so, I was happy. It was a genuine love that I'd had then, pure and sincere, and with it came an agony that was more tantalizing than it was truly painful. That is the truth.

I want nothing more nor less than to hurt in that previous exact way, just one more time.

...

What else? Ah yes, one final thing...  
The men _are_ beautiful here. Less polite, but beautiful. Chatted one up just to see if I had a chance with any of them (that was the extent of our involvement) and we got along quite well, so there's potential. After I'd adequately satisfied my curiosity, we bid each other a chaste farewell, then I went home to divide my snuff into lines. Several are still sitting out there; I've slipped some into short, hollowed-out stubs of the pens I've used up over the past months, so that I can get myself a hit whenever I want it. And _that's_ what ended up making me all nice and giddy, therefore bringing tonight's tale to a close in one, slightly-unsteady circle.

I hope you enjoyed it. As much as you could, anyway.

**03 December**

I can't believe how much patience I have lost for ancient proverbs, prescriptions and words of advice.  
The claim that 'you're supposed to marry your best friend' is an especially ridiculous one; not only do I know now that best friends are not inherently obliged to give you their everything, _my_ best friend wouldn't have agreed with that as much as I once did. Besides, my best friend was a man, and there's something about this combination of genders that make an alarming number of people withdraw their words of encouragement.

Support is for everyone who needs it, apparently, unless you're in love with the wrong person.

**04 December**

You: muted and serene in the expanse of my memory, like Monet (the sweet, silky oils).  
Pure. Oceanic. Claude-Monet blue.

(Entry inspired by a visit to the _Musée des Beaux-Arts_ , standing in awe in front of the Monet collection.)

**06 December**

Dream: you after a shower. Candlelit bedroom, a Pink Floyd record playing on the side, snowstorm battering against the window. But the curtains are closed, and as far as I know or care about, we're quite safe and warm; seeing that you're wearing nothing but a towel, I reach out and claim it from your body, drying you off with gentle care and a sort of forwardness.  
Your shoulders lightly speckled with dew. I lick it off and you shiver, before playfully pushing me away amidst laughing protests.

I had almost forgotten your laughter. Woke up feeling glad, but with tears hot in my eyes.  
Did a line and that left only the good memories behind; I was calm again after that.

**07 December**

Imagined dialogue with an anonymous therapist and an unwilling, just-as-anonymous patient:

X: But you have friends.  
Y:  
X: By all accounts you are a very charming young man.  
Y: ...  
X: You have a lot of friends. What do you offer them to make them so supportive?  
Y: ...  
X: What do you offer them to make them so supportive?

(T: Tell me what you can offer _me_.)

(T: Then we'll talk.)

**07-08 December (?)**

I wander the city all day and get half drunk at night.

The pills for most part have not caused much change in me. For most part, I am troubled by this news because all that I hoped that they _would_ change remains; I have always been a tad anxious, and I _would_ be happy to not have physical urges for a while, at least. The insomnia, though - _that_ is new. I wake around four forty or fifty in the morning to agitated darkness, and stare at the small lights that dance behind the curtain (no matter how firmly I shut them) - the slow migration of morning traffic like dying fireflies, interspersed with the dull soundless click of the streetlights being extinguished one by one. In time the edges of the curtain grows light, devouring the so-called fireflies in its expanse, but until then I manage to see what is _really_ there.

Death, restless - sleepless death - one whole day nearer now.  
Breathing down my neck, its cold bony fingers grasping me in its embrace.

At 4:40 AM sanity visits and all hedonistic thought is impossible, but how, and where, and when I will myself die.

For one hour and twenty minutes sanity visits and I am in my right mind again.

...

Which is just as well, because that's about as long as I can actually _stand_ being in the correct frame of mind.

Sanity gives me clarity of mind for a mere second before thoughts flood back in again. They come at random, and at first I am able to keep up with the flow; sometimes serious concerns are the first to come by, and they get the brunt of what remains of my rationality when I consider them. When that happens, I can file those thoughts away for another time and let the smaller worries pass by, and I feel that the worst is over. But more often than not _petty_ thoughts are the first to occupy my mind, running on and on and they never stop and because I can feel myself becoming overwhelmed I get angry. This immediately reminds me of you and what you were so good at, which does not help my mood. Because you were my balance; you were the yin to my yang; whenever my fuse ran too short you controlled it for me, and together we formed a perfect dual-stasis of a sort, wholly comfortable where we were and relying on each other to maintain this equilibrium. Perhaps everything was doomed to go wrong in the first place, even before the night of the accident, because I got too greedy. Because I coveted you when I never should have, knowing that you would never have returned my feelings in _good time_ , and likely never at all. I'd wanted you more than I had ever wanted anything else in my life - and my God, as much as I hate to admit it, I think this want was also a vital _need_. That realization is painful and raw every time, and that is what makes my anger dissipate into fear, simply realizing that _I need you._

Yes.

Yes, I do, yes, my love, I _need_ you. So badly that I can't even breathe.  
I can't do this all on my own. All of this - this _living_.  
I'm used to a life built for two. I'm used to receiving sleepy-sweet morning calls from a voice different to my own, two pairs of shoes next to the door instead of just one scattered about on their own, cooking in dual (or more) portions instead of only one. I'm used to extending my hand with the expectation that another will reciprocate its hold. I'm used to someone helping me along the sidewalk when I'm drunk or high, down familiar streets with a familiar grip on my arm/hand/shoulder, leading me to safety in tight-lipped silence. I'm used to dreading the scolding that is sure to follow such an event, as well as being flattered that I am cared for with so much sincere anxiety.

I feel that the epitome of caring for someone is the ability to _stop them_ but no one can stop me now

...

not after you proved how hard this actually was  
and in the process stopped _yourself_ forever.

...

_(later)_

The worst part of your absence is that I can now see myself for what I really am, but for some reason refuse to change it.  
No help from your end, either.

**10 December**

_Ne me quitte pas!_  
_Je ne vais plus pleurer;_  
_je ne vais plus parler,_  
_je me cacherai là_  
_à te regarder_  
_danser et sourire et_  
_à t’écouter_  
_chanter_  
_et puis rire._

\- Jacques Brel.

~~_(afternoon / 12th)_ ~~

~~no but seriously~~

~~why did you leave me?~~  
~~why? what on earth did you think _you_ would get out of this?~~  
~~what possessed you to think that this was a sensible thing to do?~~  
~~how fucking _dare_ you? i don't remember agreeing to any of this~~  
~~good fucking riddance you bastard i hope hell is every bit as miserable as you feared~~

~~you disgust me. you make me feel sick just knowing that you existed~~

~~curse you for ever having lived~~  
~~i loathe everything about you and everyone who could never see you for what you really were:~~  
~~yes, you and your second-hand hugo and your absurdly bourgeois name and your fascist great-grandfather~~  
~~the apple never falls very far from the tree, does it?~~  
~~all you were in the end was a cold-hearted tyrant~~  
~~i hate them all and you the most, i really do~~

~~i hate you. you miserable, wretched creature!~~

~~_(13th?)_ ~~

~~i'm sorry~~

~~i'm sorry, i'm sorry, i'm sorry~~  
~~i was wrong. i'm sick. i'm really, really sick and i don't know what to do~~  
~~please forget all i wrote up there i didn't mean it i swear to god~~

~~i envy whoever might be up there for being able to see you when i cannot~~

~~i am a cruel and jealous man and i suffer bitterly for it~~  
~~because i am jealous i blame myself for being jealous~~  
~~i am constantly afraid that my jealousy will be the injury of another~~  
~~while also ridiculing myself for having succumbed to such a vile and banal emotion~~

~~i am excluded and aggressive and not in my right mind and so, so brutally _common_~~

~~again and again.~~  
~~_Die Ewige Wiederkunft_ at its finest~~

~~listen.~~

~~i am here to remember~~

~~i _need_ to remember~~

~~i have this grief in me and most days i just don't understand why~~

~~there is a man i am looking for and i have searched all over two cities for him~~  
~~i have no choice but to carry on, lost, so completely lost in this fucking mess of a human being~~  
~~i have known from the beginning that it was futile but i cannot stop~~  
~~and even though i cannot remember the name of that man i cannot forget~~

~~baby, baby, baby.~~

~~i love you~~  
~~i love you and you're...~~

~~... you're...~~

**14 December**

Had hot, rough, pointless sex wearing nothing but your bracelets, wondering if you had ever done the same thing.  
I wouldn't let him kiss me and in some minor notion of vengeance he covered my neck and chest in bruises.

I can't even pretend to be optimistic about this, I'm fucking crying

**15 December**

He did apologize before he left last night and that makes it all okay I guess?  
I don't know.

_(evening)_

Back home from the motel. Haven't eaten all day, no desire to move from bed. Snowing outside.  
I think of the mornings when I pleaded sick and didn't go to school, only to sneak out after my parents had left, and making my way over to yours. A whistled tune or a small pebble tapping on the glass would bring you (still dressed in pyjamas, a stray feather from your pillow stuck to your hair) over to the window, you smiling that slow, abashed grin at me, understanding sparking between the two of us before you let me in. Then you would make me a hot chocolate with marshmallows on top and give it to me to sip at while you showered and got changed; we'd stay home all day, not sick in the slightest and content to watch old black-and-white films or episodes of _Harlock_. When we got hungry we'd make ourselves _croque-madames_ and tomato soup. Sometimes I made you pasta. At a certain time I would say goodbye to you and hurry back home to curl up in bed, again pretending a sleepy, too-warm demeanour as if I'd been feeling ill all day long.

I don't actually think my parents bought it after the first couple of times, but they always left us be. I think they'd have been fine with seeing us together, they knew we were too close to pry apart.

But that's all hypothetical anyway, it's not like I ever asked.  
I don't care. I don't care...

_(dawn)_

I'm refusing to eat or cook because of a lack of anybody important to feed.

_(morning)_

I counted the bruises. Sixteen of them. I held back tears as I applied ointment to each one.  
It's not even like they're _bad_ bruises, I can't say that he _hurt_ me. I'm not in physical pain and I don't hold anything against the guy. All I'm saying is that it's the most wretched experience to be nursing your own wounds, especially if they're self-inflicted or if you asked for it. It makes you feel like the biggest hypocrite in the world for trying to hurt yourself and to keep yourself going at the same time.

Worthless.

_(later)_

Have I ever had an emotionally genuine sexual experience?

A strange thing to ask now, when I have had many sexual encounters and have even enjoyed some. But the more I think about recent times, the more I feel that the answer to that question is no - and this is a frightening thing to acknowledge. Because if that is indeed the case and I have never actually known what emotionally genuine sex is like, how am I craving it in the exact manner of _wanting to return_ to that precise experience? What _are_ my sweet, sensual dreams involving you fueled by? You alone?

Do I just have absurdly high expectations for sex? But then why am I - _was_ I - ever satisfied by those inferior encounters at all?

I've been thinking about this since even before I left Argenteuil, but it was the experience of the fourteenth (however long ago _that_ was) that has gotten me musing upon this question with urgency. It was a hasty encounter that rendered him _and_ myself uncomfortable at the end, really - all night long I gave him mixed messages and refused to let him walk away when he had the chance. (Not that he ever told me he wanted to stop or to leave, but still.) I don't know what expectations I even had for him, really. Maybe I wanted to seek comfort - but what kind? Being able to forget your touch can't be it; we've never interacted intimately. I don't want another best friend or partner. Maybe I want to fix my life to some degree, but then what about all the encounters I had (and wasn't fulfilled by) when my life _wasn't_ falling apart so horrendously? All night long I thought about this and the conclusion I've reached for the time being is an uneasy synthesis - both of the idea that my satisfactions were genuine, and that there is an immense gulf between physical and emotional satisfaction that I have so far underestimated. I think that when I have slept with all those strangers, I have been doing so to chase that fleeting, _former_ feeling; that would explain why I have gotten tired of them, and by extension the act of intercourse, so easily. There is only so much physical satiation the body can take. The emotional completion is but a dream, because I have restricted myself to the thought that this was only attainable with you, and you are no longer here. There is nothing _external_ stopping me from trying to connect with someone else in a similar way; I could get any man I want, but I simply am not motivated enough to try beyond the superficial 'getting'. It hurts too much.

I don't think I actually like sex that much. A strange thing to confess, especially after all those lewd fantasies.

It started off wrong from the beginning. I lost my virginity at seventeen years old, and even after that first experience I lay there wishing and wishing that I was being held by you instead. I sought _that_ feeling far more than I ever liked the sensation of coming; I have attempted to feel this ghostly, never-experienced pleasure with all my partners since with no success. You, though? You probably lost yours to a girlfriend on a random summer night, feeling perfectly content afterwards with no thought of me on your mind whatsoever. Perhaps you've had bad or unsuccessful encounters, but I don't think any of yours were so fundamentally empty. You never told me about it, anyway, if you ever felt like that.

I don't know. All of this is guesswork. I think about making love to you all the time, but maybe I'd eventually have stopped enjoying it as much, even with you. Maybe I'd have gotten bored of sex for its own sake. The difference between you and other people is that with you, I never would have minded the lack of physical pleasure - I'd have thought of it as a sign that we were moving emotionally closer, and would have focused all my efforts on furthering that connection instead. I mean, long-time partners and married couples don't necessarily make love all the time; sex is not the master key to creating such a bond. Something _else_ keeps those people going stronger than ever. A single kiss from you would have made me positively melt from pleasure, not from the physical contact but from the very _idea_ of you showing me just how much you loved me. Leaning in and caressing my body, your mouth soft and sweet against mine, my eyes fluttering shut as you (for several long, heavenly seconds) claimed the entirety of my world as your own. If you were more driven towards physical desires, then I'd have happily satisfied you, because that would have been the kind of sex with _honesty_ behind it; I have no doubt that you would have catered well to my emotional needs in return. We found each other through music, childish pleasures, and by observing how the other reacted to various things - we would never have been friends in the first place without that emotional acceptance, and that's what I crave endlessly and never quite manage to find.

But that isn't for the objective lack of acceptance in the world.  
It didn't have to be this way yet I staunchly refuse to change my mind.

_(later)_

Any man I want, except the man I want.

_(later)_

Made a _croque-madame_ and tomato soup, like the old days. They didn't taste of much but salt and a bit of grease.  
But I know you'd have wanted me to eat... _something._

I need to get washed and dressed...

_(later)_

I need a drink. Maybe the shops are still open.

_(later)_

Back. Two bottles of butterscotch schnapps to celebrate the good old days.

 

 

 

haha

_(19th?)_

Horrible figure of mourning.  
Acedia; hard-heartedness; annoyance; inebriation; impotence to love.

All around me are superficial pleasures.  
Music for my ears; schnapps to sweeten my tongue and throat; a bath to warm my body in; delightful city boys to feast my eyes upon a mere two-three blocks away; nice clothes to adorn myself with when I am in the mood for attention. I lack nothing but am anguished nevertheless because I don't know how to restore _generosity_ to my life, i.e. love.

How does one love again in a situation like this?  
How does one give it, which is more important than the fall _into_ love? A question for the ages.

_(19th)_

I am currently sitting in front of your picture. There is an empty bottle of butterscotch schnapps rolling by my feet, all clean and washed out and dry, and scattered about me like some unholy ritual circle are my shirt, trousers, socks and underwear. I'm not wearing a single thing, see, and I'm sitting kind of in a yoga position and letting you have a good long look at my body. Like, _here, these are my arms and legs and this is my hard-on and these are your bracelets around each of my wrists like handcuffs,_ and so on. I don't really know what I'm getting out of this, but I felt that it was _important_ that you saw. Perhaps I want to tell you that this is what the person who craved you so badly looks like, or maybe I just didn't want to _hide_ for once, because (as I've said before), before today I was all gauche and shy about undressing in front of your picture. I'm also really drunk which probably has something to do with it too. It's past bedtime and there's so much alcohol in my system that it's unbelievable.

Yeah, I'm kind of completely off my meds at the moment  
threw them away over a week ago.

It shows, doesn't it?

But.

Anyway.

I had a dream earlier. Not during the night, but during a nap I took around ten or eleven in the morning. That dream's kind of the reason I'm currently sitting naked in front of your picture, I suppose, not that I ever thought the _reason_ was important. I was kneeling on the floor with my arms encircling your legs, which were slim but firm and strong - you were stronger than I - and the moment I was conscious of myself holding them, I was enchanted by your rigidity that grounded me. You remained inert for most part, I perceived only a faint breathing and the touch of your hand upon my head (caressing my hair, so softly I could barely feel it) as you entered my mouth with the sudden sharpness of a steeple puncturing a cloud of ink. You did not move, you were not asleep, you were not _elsewhere_ or attempting to be so. There was a gift of stillness about you, something that was almost holy, so much that even as I sucked you I thought that we were engaging in something chaste. It wasn't a matter of lust for once. I wasn't turned on, but I _was_ enraptured - I was _worshipping_ you with vigour. Had you been lying down naked I would have wanted to say Mass on your chest, or something like that. Eventually I felt you flowing into me, warm and white, in small continuous jerks; but I don't remember anything else of it, not the taste and certainly not some kind of corresponding arousal from my part. Looking back on it, I'm not certain that you came at all - perhaps it was only play. I just know that just after the moment of the climax I dared to look up at your face, and that you seemed to be lit up with a calm ecstasy, enveloping your blessed body with what I believe can be described as a _supernatural nimbus._

This has been a recent trend, actually. I have not talked of a dream about you since the sixth, but I've been thinking of you and dreaming of you every night since then. For someone who sleeps so unsteadily and so little I have had a lot of dreams, so many that I have begun to feel as if my purpose on earth is to dream, full stop. I was ashamed to admit to some of them and not all of them have been sexual, but recently you have taken on a quality quite impossible to describe. Beyond earthly pleasures, almost. I feel like you are trying to tell me some kind of vital truth about my life, not just the life I have lived so far or the life I am leading in the present, but the very _essence_ of my being. The thing that will determine my entire future and my end. I marvel at you far more than I lust for you, and considering how much I _do_ desire you physically, that's saying something.

Hang on.  
Let me finish off this line...

...

Mm.

I would very much like to make love to you, regardless of whether from the front or from behind. But if you didn't want to make love, that'd be fine too. (I talk often of romancing you, but these are high points of my fantasy, and even if you were still around there would have been no guarantee that any of them would come true.) I would like to see your face crushed against the soft white pillow as I slip it in and I would like to hear you groan delicately beneath me, the way one sighs, but I would be just as happy to lie a little ways off you, focused on eating snacks out of a china bowl while you read a magazine, one of our favourite movies playing in the background. I want to see you deeply threaded by my cock and become something quite other than yourself - a being quite different from merely my _lover_ \- but in a way, you already _are_ , so that desire may well be redundant. For I want nothing but for us to _form one body_ , whether spiritually or in the flesh, and I am not quite sure as to what that means any more. Once I thought that that feeling stemmed from a simple, morbid sexual fascination with you, a fantasy spiralling out of control due to your failure to ~~exist~~ put me in my place, but I don't think it's just that. I'm no longer sure whether it is because I knew you so well that I dream so intensely of you, or whether because I knew you _not at all_ that those dreams have become necessary to fill in the details (or worse - deliberately replace whatever about you I didn't like, with what I'd have _preferred_ ).

Which option would I prefer? I need to think about that, too, I guess. So much of what I dream about you has been my invention and nothing more. I have never felt the intimate touch of your body against mine; I certainly never confessed, for back then I didn't even have the certainty of my own attraction towards you that I have now; not even the smiles you give me in my dreams are authentic. You never looked so purposely alluring in life.

I think about all of this and wonder who it is really that I love, and whether I am even in love with you - the _absent_ you - at all.

_(later)_

... but I _have_ known your body, pyjama-soft and warm against mine in the queen-sized bed during one of our many sleepovers. How once, your pyjama top became partially unbuttoned, revealing to me half an expanse of (then-pale) skin, flushed and faintly damp in our combined warmth, and how I wanted to put my mouth to that secretive place even then. I have known your body leaning heavily against mine as you cried your heart out for that small dove, along with the hot salt taste of your tears on my lips as I tried to soothe you. I have known your body in Ibiza, shamelessly and _innocently_ bared upon the golden sand, at the same time entirely your own and yet also mine to touch and care for; your cool, slippery skin without a hint of blemish, the careful blankness of expression as I rubbed the cream upon your back, I remember it all. Even without the presence of a physical body, I have been able to know you and love you well because of your countless _sillages_ : the imprint of your body left on my bed, a strand of hair or two lingering upon my pillow, the trail your tears left upon your cheeks that evening as you held the dove and fell asleep against my chest, your fingerprints delicately visible against the spots upon my body where you hadn't managed to rub the cream in entirely, the _many_ instances where you left your scent pressed against my books - my clothes - my sheets. I have even known your body, forming a limp and fading _pieta_ in my arms as I begged for you to hold on, the snow beneath us darkening steadily. In the direct absence of an _eros_ you awakened in me too many instances of its opposite - whether the guilty, dreadful pleasure of a _petite mort_ or a grander, infinitely more tragic death. And surely the _thanatos_ requires a similar kind of intensity as the _eros_ in order to be realized? - Let no one say that I did not _know_ you, even if it is myself.

Of course I wish that it had been different. I would be insane not to wish it so.  
Even platonic adoration is _eros_ ; I would have been glad to carry that on until we grew old and died either together or within a couple of years of each other, utterly satisfied in the inherent completion the other's presence would have afforded us. I would have liked it if we had been bound forever by that mutual will to live, to survive, to _create_. Who knows? Had you remained on earth, we could have been musicians by now, DJ-ing in small clubs and local parties first before we thought of fame, just making music that we liked. There would have been times when we would have argued about conflicting schedules and how to craft a certain piece (oh, we'd have disagreed _plenty_ ) but just as often we'd have ended up leaning over some balcony or against a brick wall as the after-party filed out past us, smoking perhaps or murmuring secrets into each other's ear perhaps, and that would have been fine. It'd have been _perfect_. It was a casual, thoughtless event like that - seeing you so quietly asleep on my shoulder - that made me realize how deep I was in and how little I would mind drowning. I would have been happy to live in a continuous chain of moments like those.

But sharing any sort of life with you is impossible now, whether fueled by the living will or the death drive. And I cannot imagine, endure, nor survive a life without you. Regardless of what might be said of my future and what else might await me in the months and years to come, I have spent so much of my _remembered_ life next to you; the first five or six years after I was born don't count, for I have no memory of that time. For over half of my life, caring for and loving you was my _purpose._

...

Come back to me, please.  
Come back to me as if in a dream, or a miracle, or even an elaborate lie. Come back to me and tell me that this was all a nightmare and nothing more. Please hold me and tell me that the bad times are over, that you're back for good and that there's no more need for me to cry.

Please?

**20 December**

In the morning I open my eyes to find a man standing in the middle of the apartment. The world is dark outside with only flecks of white snow clinging to the window glass. I have never welcomed this man inside, nor can I say that I recognize him, but I am remarkably untroubled by his presence as he moves about, as if he has always existed in this place. He opens the fridge door, shuts it again with a sigh, and informs me that it is like a desert in there; _there's nothing inside, not even a bottle of water_ , he mumbles, sounding utterly defeated. His speech is faint and keeps fading in and out. I merely watch him from the bed, focusing especially on his movements - never exaggerated in gesture, tone or voice, but the sheer _intensity_ with which he speaks and gazes into air makes me feel as I am watching some elaborate monologue.

He comes and stands in front of me at last. Our eyes meet. He says that this is no joking matter.  
I know that. Of course it's no joking matter - I've known that since forever.

 _You have to move on,_ he says, but all I can do is to look at him wordlessly.

Who is he?  
Who _was_ he?

He turns away. I have escaped his notice once more. He bends down and picks up a small cake box from where it was placed by the door; setting it down on the table, he heads over to the small kitchen to pick out a snow-white plate, standing on tiptoes just like the way a dead man I once knew used to do. He wipes it clean with a damp kitchen towel (a habit I distinctly remember that man having as well) and opens the box; I stare at the plate as eventually a hearty slice of cinnamon pound cake is set upon it, and he comes over to give it to me.

 _I think,_ he says, and smiles - only faintly. _I think if you kept a small cactus or five, it would really brighten up the place._

I don't understand what he's trying to tell me.  
In the absence of a fork there isn't much I can do with this slice of cake, save for looking down at it blankly. While I am doing that, he busies himself with making the coffee; two sugars and a splash of milk, exactly how the dead man liked it. Soon the scent of coffee thickens and spreads across the apartment in a warm, bittersweet haze.

 _And you'll become mummified, just like that,_ he continues, as if he never paused at all, when our eyes meet again. _Eventually everything in you will dry up, and what happens then? You'll become a mummy once and for all, a mummy surrounded by cacti and clutching helplessly onto a desertified fridge, unable to move or weep or do anything at all whatsoever._

Click. A fork is set down upon my plate. A coffee-filled mug placed on the bedside table.

_I don't know. Maybe that really is the best thing that could happen to you. It might even be what you want in life._

He sits opposite me with a slice of cake for himself. I look at him closely, wondering if I might see my dead man in him.  
No such luck. I am familiar with _this_ man as well, but he has little to do with the one who is dead. But I cannot remember why that other man died, nor even the small facts about him like his name and the reason for his death, only the fact that it hasn't been a year since he left.

He wraps his hand around the coffee mug.

_But I don't think that's the right path for you, personally._

He brushes his hair out of his eyes. Soft curls, like mine.

_You don't remember much now, do you?_

I tell him that this is the case, and he nods gravely in response.

_I am someone like you, but I am not you.  
So this tragedy that I'm commenting on is all yours, you see._

A _tragedy?_  
Tragedy, indeed. _Tragedy._ Hmm.

No, I reckon that life is better this way. Quieter but better. I am not necessarily trying to remember anything about the dead man because he made me _happy_ or _fulfilled;_ in many ways I think it was the exact opposite. Now that he is gone, I no longer have to deal with his frustrating silences, moments that I used to suspect consisted of deep-seated contempt, and his countless mysteries that tired me out far more than they ever fascinated. No one insults a dead person, but sometimes I do feel like making significant exceptions just for him - despite not being able to remember him very much at all - and speak as if he wasn't the single most important human being in the universe.

Sometimes, that feels liberating.  
Only sometimes. The rest of the time, I feel pathetic.

_All I can say is that the desert is a lonely place to be in. Nothing can live in it, after all._

But isn't that what I want?  
So nothing can judge me or hurt me again?

_You would do well to avoid it._

His fingernails are well-trimmed and clean.

At this point I am too pained to even attempt a reply. I turn back to the cake, take up the fork with a tangible slowness, and cut off a small corner for myself; it is moist and spicy upon my tongue. I swallow, then pick up the mug to drink the coffee, feeling its now-lukewarm sweetness trickle down my parched throat and right into my stomach. It is the coffee that reawakens my taste buds and my perception of warmth once and for all, and through this minor revival I rather abruptly manage to remember what the dead man was like, down to every cell and scrap of memory. The way he spoke as if he was engaged in a perpetual recital rather than conversing normally - the cake that he so loved, amongst many others - how he would neatly divide his slice into quarters with the right side of the fork tilted at a steep angle - the faintly-rounded tips of his fingernails.

Alas, I have now remembered them all. Old sorrow rises rapidly like the tide in my throat.  
With stinging eyes I look up and see that the man is gone. Somewhere far in the distance I can hear the whisper of a sandstorm.

...

Why is it that I have been in mourning for so long?  
Why is it that I cannot stop my sadness?

...

The tears do not come, though I hurt enough to think that I am close to it. Perhaps I have become mummified, just as he said.

I do not remember how long I have been sitting here.  
At some point I decided wilfully to forget.

**21 December**

(After months of traveling in an attempt to leave everything behind, the truth finally dawned upon him:  
he was the one who'd been left behind all along.)

**21 December**

[Train back to Nantes; ashamed; deeply disturbed, not comfortable anywhere.]

Failed trip.

Why is it that I can no longer bear traveling?  
Why is it that I keep trying, like some kind of lost child, to 'get back home' - though I can no longer consider Paris my home, as you are no longer there? Why this cry - _I want to go back!_ \- though I have no idea where to return to?

_(later)_

_Let us give up, go down; (he) will not care._  
_Though all the stars made gold of all the air,_  
_And the sea moving saw before it move_  
_One moon-flower making all the foam-flowers fair;_  
_Though all those waves went over us, and drove_  
_Deep down the stifling lips and drowning hair,_  
_(He) would not care._

\- From Swinburne.

_(evening)_

I know. Okay. You probably want to know what happened, don't you?  
Might as well tell you, why not. It's not like I have anything better or happier to talk about.

Papa and Maman asked me to come back for Christmas before I even left on my journey. For the past couple of months I've been operating under the assumption that I _would_ be able to return to them with a relatively clear mind, too. Sure, there was nothing mentioned of the possibility that I would live with them again, that that would be the end of my journey - but going home just for a few days, until the Christmas traffic died down and I could resume my wanderings, _that_ sounded a harmless and simple thing to achieve. So I took the train to Paris, a smaller bag packed with necessities by my side, never suspecting until the moment I was walking down the path towards the front door that I would not be able to go inside. No one was there when I arrived - I rang the doorbell three times and I faintly heard it echo behind the closed door, with no answer - and when I attempted to unlock the door myself the doorknob felt _wrong_ , so cold and foreign under my palm that I immediately flinched away. I could not even bear the thought of touching it a second time.

With that action came guilt, by no means an unfamiliar emotion to me; but alongside the already-heavy guilt I have been feeling over your absence, there was the sense that I had betrayed my family by not being able to accept home as home. Ever since I'd left, I'd still relied on the continued existence of this place as my _final destination_ , where I could always come to rest and be loved again when I wearied of my travels. I never thought that I could find my own home so repelling, but repelling it was, and before I quite knew it I had turned on my heels and had begun to run back down the path, turning the familiar corner, then another about thirty metres ahead, until I was out of the area altogether. Guilt ringing through my body all the time, shaking me to the core - wringing my stomach before letting it uncurl and rest, only to repeat the process shortly after. Every second that I was there, or felt myself to be too near there, I felt an overpowering and all-consuming dread of _confrontation_ as if Maman/Papa/some other neighbour/your parents (?)/Paul (?)/you in the flesh (???) would see me and either call out my name or downright chase me down the road.

But no one did. No one caught me or noticed me even as I fled back to the station, back into the lies.

No, it wasn't a fear that made sense.  
I feared a confrontation that would never arrive, though I deserved it. The retribution that ought to be slammed down upon me by the forces of all those who I have wronged, and maybe the wrath of whoever might be up there, if there indeed is anyone. I do not think that there was anything anybody I've listed up there could have _done_ to me, strictly speaking - maybe a dose of vitriol from your parents, in the absolute worst case scenario. (But I don't believe that they even hate me at present, even though I completely deserve to be hated, so maybe that's not a viable scenario at all.) I was afraid of being confronted, yes, but I almost wish that that'd been the thing I was most afraid of. At least a fear like that has a way out. I could get either talked to or shouted at for a limited amount of time and it would be _over_. This, though? This constant dread and anticipation? My mouth is so dry that if my own life depended on it I couldn't spit.

So here I am again. I hope that wasn't too surprising a conclusion for you.  
Back in Nantes, alone and hating myself, reciting a mantra between sips of whiskey in an attempt to _trivialize_ the truth.

But I can't.

...

You can't ever go home, Thomas.  
You never had a home.

…

Lying in bed, I had the sudden urge to call for help.  
Anyone, really. Anyone as long as they weren’t direct family. Laurent was the first person who came to mind – I don’t dare think about Paul a lot, at least most of the time, out of the fear that it is _dangerous_ for me to be with him – and on a whim I reached for the medal he had given me, the St. Christopher that I had so faithfully worn around my neck whenever I was journeying towards somewhere else. Something about how I thought its cool touch would soothe me, how it would point me the way towards a better future – or else, home. I would pick it up, contemplate it, and then I would go wherever it told me to.

I never even got to the contemplation stage.  
The chain broke in my hand as I grasped it; as I watched helplessly, the St. Christopher slipped between my fingers, and clattered onto the floor.

…

So it goes.

_(later; 26th? 27th?)_

Christmas came and went without fanfare.  
Didn't celebrate. In a corner are parcels and letters from family/friends that have not been opened.  
Don't think I'll ever open them, if I'm quite honest.

...

I've eaten most of my meals.  
Exercised a bit too whenever I could.  
Didn't give myself away to strangers, either.

So I think I've been doing okay?

... It's just that I can't really remember what happened since I came back from Paris.

...

Might have gone back to a different _arrondissement_ of Paris or Dijon or wherever at some point, but...

...

You know what the really scary part of all this is?  
Not growing old. Not having wasted a year. Not even the never-ending sinkhole that is my period of mourning. No, the scary part is that I'm beginning to get used to this. Waking up, half drunk and surrounded by objects that have given their loyalty to the real owner of this apartment, head aching with no recollection of how I got back. Sometimes there are bottles rolling about, sometimes the faint traces of powder spread out on the linoleum or within plastic bags, and occasionally I've found someone else's jewellery or clothing on the floor (despite never having invited them in, or having slept with them anywhere). I only ever get shown what is relevant instead of the whole picture, and sometimes I don't even get that, or _what is relevant_ proves to be so bizarre and frightening that I need to drink more to forget. I have written quite a long-winded chronicle of my past year in this journal, but lately it really does feel as if I am living in some Kafkaesque nightmare of a story, where no events connect in a meaningful way. I appear to be jumping from action to action instead of having any idea as to where my life is going.

It's morning. Or I think it ought to be the morning. I have no idea what time it is. My watch stopped weeks ago and there are no other clocks in this apartment; evidently the guitarist who owns the place functioned exactly like me, in that he relied on wristwatches and the view outside to gain knowledge of the time, instead of bringing it indoors as a permanent fixture. Not that I blame him, or by extension, myself for that decision. It is probably the most blameless thing I have done or believed in during recent times.  
Humans will revert to pure instinct in the absence of clocks and calendars. Time is illusionary and often useless.

I am awake but I am not refreshed. Maybe I haven't slept at all; I sure don't feel like I have.  
My eyelids feel weighted - I can barely keep them open long enough to write this diary - but I cannot sleep.

I am so, so tired.

I'm tired of being drunk. Of being high. I'm tired of the _voices._  
I'm so tired of everything and I just want it to go away. I want to sit in this darkened apartment forever, where no one can hurt me and I can do no harm to anyone else.

...

Caught sight of myself in the mirror. Dark-clothed, fitting for winter; lying down on my side; lethargic.  
If I weren't so thin I'd look like a beached dolphin or something.

Ha.

... But surely even beached dolphins have more structure to their life than I. Whenever beached cetaceans come ashore, people play it up like it's some great mystery, and claim that they don't know what caused them to do such a thing. But I don't think it's half as complicated as that.  
They simply became uninterested in their tomorrows, that's all.

What's so interesting about the life of a dolphin anyway? What gives?  
Every day the oceans become a little more polluted; they run out of creatures to either aid or bully, depending on their species and their collective mood; sometimes they get attacked or eaten by larger creatures; if they're really unlucky they might even be captured and kept in an aquarium with unethical business practices, doomed to rot away in there forever. I'm sure life as a dolphin has its perks, but it is not - if I might dare say - a life with many possibilities beyond that. A dolphin is a dolphin. It cannot choose to live the life of a housecat or a dove. And sometimes being a dolphin just isn't going to be good enough to allow them to survive, not even for dolphins themselves.  
People seem to think that suicide, or to a lesser extent becoming weary of one's situation, are states of mind that require a higher level of cognition (or worse - some deep, humanistic, existential _agony_ ) than what most animals have. But I don't think that at all. To me these things are no different to what a lizard that will sever its own tail to run away does. Suicide feels to me like a natural conclusion that many species reach once they have perceived that they've run out of options; nothing unusual or worrying about it.

...

Humans run out of options too.  
One wouldn't think it, our lives being so full of _potential_. But it happens. That's not anyone's fault.

...

Sometimes one just comes to the conclusion that life has become anathema.  
Some deal with it with positive thinking. Some find a new passion in life and banish the negative thoughts altogether from their mind. Other people give up a few little things and enter a subdued compromise of sorts, telling themselves that there isn't much to be done about it. But sometimes none of those things are enough. Nothing interests them anymore; their days are repetitive and boring; they no longer feel like there is room for improvement in their life.

What then? Simple. They become disinterested in what tomorrow might bring.

Because it won't bring anything of any importance.

...

...

It's tragic.

It really is.

...

Having to live like this, I mean.  
Dragging it out like this, I mean.

You don't sit around and wait for the next installment of a boring film or story, do you?  
It's like that.

...

I'm not interested in the first fucking thing about my own life.

...

...

...

It's fine...  
if I go, isn't it?

I think it will be.

...

_(later)_

[Stunningly calm since the last entry. Very clear-minded. Deferring the reckoning by looking it in the face.

Hold on, hold on, hold on...

...

hold on...]

 

...

 

...

 

...

 

[Sink or swim, Thomas Bangalter...]

 

...

 

...

 

...

today - my birthday -  
i'm feeling sick and i can no longer -

i no longer - _need_ to tell you so.

but how long everything is without you.

 

 

 

 

 

days.  
days, days and even more days

 

 

 

 

 

the audacity of the Other never fails to astound me  
of course i have not begun forgetting you.  
they don’t know what they’re talking about

_~~now you are older than him, Thomas, it’s time to move on.~~ _

blasphemous. i loved you.  
i can never resent you.  
i live in my suffering and that makes me happy  
i can ask for nothing more

you wouldn’t have understood that.  
that’s fine  
i would never have let you see me like this  
i hope you never understand  
because i love you too much

~~_but surely you don’t remember much now._ ~~

don’t remember what, exactly?  
who was it that refused to return my records?  
who was it that picked lint off my shirt in the morning?  
who was always there, eyes quietly gazing into mine,  
disapproving without ever pulling me away?  
who grasped my hand that fateful night  
when the truck’s headlights blinded me?

your hand pushed me back into the darkness  
where i could at least see

but not fast enough to pull you in.

of course i still remember you  
of course i still love you  
you saved my life

 

 

 

 

 

i wish you hadn’t

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

i wish you hadn’t  
i wish you’d just left me alone

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

no. yes. no. no. no. yes.

 

 

 

 

and because of what you did  
i will never get to tell you.

 

 

 

 

 

i love you

 

 

 

 

 

i love you and you're...

 

 

 

 

you're _dead._

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

you're dead because of me.

 

 

i killed you.  
i jumped out where i shouldn't have and i _killed you_.

 

 

 

 

 

 

no other stranger but you.  
no other stranger but me.

 _i_ suffer from _your_ death.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

it will never end.  
suffering, like a stone  
around my neck  
deep inside me  
across my wrist and the inside of my arm and they don't heal

 

i don't want them to.

 

let them scar forever  
there is no literature in suffering  
for suffering has its self-contained language  
and it can be uttered in no word but the body's own

 

 

 

 

 

despair.  
theatrical word. abstract. impenetrable. too much so; ultimately useless.

 

 

 

 

 

a stone.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

what have i left to lose now now that i have lost the reason to live  
the reason to fear for another's life instead of having them fear my own

 

 

 

every morning the wrenching begins

 

 

and all over again a cruel mourning.  
(though it never ended.)

 

 

sisyphus.

 

 

 

 

 

 

in pain we learn pain

 

 

 

 

 

 

i don't want to be alive anymore  
i don't want to be alive enough to want that

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

i am not getting better.  
in my last letter to laurent he urged me to get some more pills. begin the cycle again. he'd even come to nantes to help me if i needed support. but not only am i not living in nantes any longer, at least not in a _continuous_ sense, i don't want anything anymore.

if this is going to kill me then let me be killed by it. if this is to be the rest of my life then i cannot live.

 

 

 

 

 

 

even in the depths of winter the world is a beautiful place and i never cease to notice it  
the snow-coated windowsills sparkling in the afternoon sunlight. a squirrel or two scurrying up a tree trunk. the barren beauty of gardens, of fields and of hills, to clothe themselves again in green as if by magic once spring kisses over them again. long hours spent listening to the whisper of the wind, the caress of the slow-falling snowflakes upon the back of my hand, watching the clouds drift by, so innocent and white.

the natural world offers me a measure of stillness. it allows me to see clearly again.  
i am calm because i know that all of this will still be here when i am no longer. the world is beautiful and i am a mere speck in it.

and i made some good friends here, didn't i?  
i had some good times. i was a good student when i had the time and presence of mind. i like to think i tried to be a good son, too. i've had plenty of fun while i was here, for sure. i even managed to fall in love, and even though it didn't work out, at least in the end i wasn't afraid to express it. why, i've spent the past year writing about it, after all. some people don't even get that chance.

i haven't wasted my life. i can go.

...

life is always frightful. we cannot help it and we are responsible all the same. one is born and at once one is guilty.

i think it was hesse who said that. and i think it's true, too.

 

 

 

 

 

well, let it be that way no more.

 

 

 

 

 

letters are written to my parents and all of my friends. none posted, but placed in a box as soon as they are done, alongside a few mementos that i'd like other people to keep. i'm content knowing that i won't be seen as merely having vanished - the owner of the apartment will return in a few days, maybe a couple of weeks at the most. i wrote him a note too even though i've never met him. he'll know what to do. only when that's done can i sit down proper, and without further hesitation, i write you a letter. a letter explaining how i feel about everything wrong i have done. how i would never let it happen again if i could only get a second chance. how i am never going to get said second chance and how so very, very sorry i am. i write you a letter about how i was more fortunate than anyone on the face of this earth - because i was born, because i met you, because i became your friend. something about how i think about you every day and night. the sunlight catching against your hair. your face. your smile. all the times we had, both the good and bad. more often that all of those things put together, i write about how i think about the times that we _could_ have had, and now never will. how everything since then has been either a waste of time, or ultimately a futile effort to get better. months of both blaming you and idolizing you for the things that were, in the end, my own problems that i'd hoped you would somehow help to fix. but it was never reasonable to expect you to do the hard work for me, and i realize that now, even though it is too late to tell you this face to face. in this letter, i talk about how i would happily take all of this back - how i would make all of this my own pain and my own only, how i'd gladly erase all of this and myself along with it if necessary, if it meant that you could be here again. if it meant that you could live a long happy life without me. i write about how i would do anything to achieve this outcome. i write of how i'd never understood what love was until you came along and held my hand; even when we were too young, i was in love, and i was so afraid of what you would think that i could never admit it out loud. but i knew that i was in love even when i was a schoolboy - even when i was little more than a _child_ \- and i knew from the beginning that i would treasure you as long as i lived, regardless of whether you felt the same or not, because i would not find a single friend who would be as incredible and inspiring as you were. it seems ridiculous then to admit that i was the one who ruined it all, but what else can i write in the face of truth?

it was my fault that you died. i write this down as well.  
i don't feel healed or relieved by doing so. tired, rather, but like i did something right.

i write a letter that is the purest distillation of this diary imaginable. the first envelope i picked out can barely hold the pages together, but eventually i purchase one that will let the entire letter fit. twenty pages, written upon on both sides in the smallest handwriting i can physically manage - twenty neatly-folded pages full of me, of myself at my most vulnerable and exposed, imprinted upon with my tears and the occasional smudges of ink. twenty pages containing the essence of thomas bangalter, pressed into the envelope with your name written neatly on the front.

i write this letter and it never gets mailed, because i don't know your address.  
one rainy morning i take the train to the cemetery and set the letter down in front of your grave. even in my grief i've had the presence of mind to buy a wreath of flowers, though i no longer have the energy to weave complicated messages into it. i have said all i have needed to say in my letter and there just isn't a point in being coy any more. as i observed months before, it's not as if you cared much for the language of flowers anyway.

...

all those visits filled with regret and self-loathing, but i've always neglected the most important thing i ought to have done.  
_asking_. making it not about me for once.

 

 

 

what's it like where you are now?  
are you okay?

 

 

 

is there a heaven? an afterlife? a _recognizable_ one?  
or is it every believer or non-believer to the place of their own making?  
i don't know. i just want to believe that you are somewhere like that.  
somewhere nice and peaceful, where you can't be hurt any more.  
no one would have called you saintly in life, but considering what you did for me at the very least...

me, and everyone else...

 

 

 

 

 

but... you know...

 

 

if it's not real...  
if heaven's just a fantasy of humans...

 

 

then you're still in there, right?

 

 

...

 

 

isn't it...

 

 

cold... down there?

 

...

 

colder than you were in my arms that night?

 

...

 

well?

is it?

 

 

 

i turn away and walk off for the last time, not wanting to picture you in that earth  
(soaking through/freezing steadily under the weight of winter)  
before i go i drape my jacket around your headstone and stumble my way down the path.

 

 

on the way out i have the feeling that i have passed by your parents

 

 

voices call me but i run, run as hard as i can out of the cemetery gates and towards the station

 

 

i am not stopped.  
i cannot be.

 

...

 

(the first letter i wrote was to them anyway.)

 

 

 

...

 

 

 

...

 

 

come to. standing on the bridge.  
the musty river air, the squeal of seagulls in the distance. turquoise sky, darkening rapidly into night.  
in front of me stretching into forever is water: in one long winding length, so serene, rippling vaguely beneath the evening breeze.

i am so tired.

...

having completed my obligations to other people, and left alone at last, my thoughts can safely return to myself again  
the strongest feeling right now is the sense that my time is up

 

 

 

(sink or swim, thomas bangalter.)

 

 

 

and i look down at the gaping expanse beneath me  
my bones feel so light / i have lost so much weight  
i am briefly worried that i will not be able to sink in the way i wanted

 

 

 

but you were heavier dead than alive

 

 

 

i think i want to keep my shoes.  
you liked the look of them, so

 

 

 

 

 

please don't try to find me. by the time anyone reads this i will be gone.  
i want no rescue or retrieval efforts to be spent on the likes of me.  
you will find my belongings already packed in this address in nantes.

my parents can be contacted in montmartre.  
ask for daniel vangarde. he will know

 

 

the included photo is of the one who i dedicate this book and my life to

 

 

and i now leave this journal in the mercy of whoever finds it.

 

 

 

(and suddenly the world i am aiming to leave and am addressing in my anguish is _not the diary's own_ )

 

 

 

(and i hold your hand.)

 

 

 

...

 

 

 

(i'm coming now, darling, let us stop hiding ourselves  
i bring with me a fresh field of stars to blanket and watch over us every night  
this is the second chance i never would have gained in this world  
you can bet that i won't mess it up this time.

we can be wonderful  
we can have the world revolving around us  
you were my world even on earth after all

come now, let us abandon reason  
let us play together  
let us pretend that we do not need to hide  
let us pretend that neither of us ever had to go through the bother of dying)

 

 

...

 

 

(but if reincarnation is real and we are granted a second life, then let us not meet again  
you have caused me too much pain, my darling

let us just remain in liminal space forever and pretend

because pretending is the first step towards making real.)

 

 

(yes.)

 

 

(yes, we can do that.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(breathe in, thomas  
breathe in slow  
keep your eyes closed if you must)

 

 

 

 

 

 

(wasn't a very far drop, was it?)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(breathe)

 

 

 

 

 

 

(breathe)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_I will always love you.  
I will never lie to you.  
I will never betray you._

_On my life._

 

 

 

...

 

 

 

_I swear..._

 

 

 

(breathe)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_Guy_

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_I promise._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My life has been a life of much shame.
> 
> I think it has been obvious through this tale that I haven't been in the best of moods in recent times. I like to think that I have been honest about feeling this way, but there is a lot _else_ surrounding it that I have concealed and have been suffering with for a long time. Some things, for years and years on end. Some things that changed since this time last year. 
> 
> There are a lot of people who this is meant for, much like most of my other long pieces. But one of the most important people I intended it for will never read it, because they won't be able to read anything again. So really, this entire endeavour has been useless to that person from the beginning. I think there was a palpable despair emerging from knowing how futile and late my attempts at getting through to them were, and all of that went straight into this story.
> 
> I like to think that Thomas found home, though.  
> Don't you?
> 
> And either way - even though it sounds reluctant, this being one of the tenets of fanfiction - _things did not turn out like this in reality_. Their lives are much more fulfilling than this, and will be for years on end. That's the most important thing.
> 
> I would like to offer my sincere thanks to my betareaders throughout this story: daftpunktrash / huggalittlefishy / deleuzianmachine / Manon. Thank you for enduring my often-incoherent and rambling attempts at communication (for I was in a very difficult state of mind); I basically asked people to beta a chapter or 'a few months' each without ever providing much of a plan or afterword, and what can I say? Thank you for putting up with this strangely thought-out endeavour. I could not have done this without you; I will aspire to do better next time.  
> Utmost thanks to my readers as well. Please tell me what you thought of it, or give me a message. I would love to hear from you.  
> Thanks to even the sources of my inspiration, even if they all stemmed from hurtful experiences. That's life, in the end, and a few years down the line I think I would really be grateful for the learning experience.
> 
> ...
> 
> I have no idea what happens next.
> 
> [ _All I Was Doing Was Breathing_ (17/Jul/2015 - 11/Aug/2015) - Kimbk]
> 
> [ **EDIT:** As of 12/Aug/2015 the notes have been moved to [their own 'chapter' at the end](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4334822/chapters/10380342). For the last part, ' _The Fall_ ':
> 
> \- the entries of 22, 23, 27 and 30 September,  
> \- the entries of 19, 25 and 28 October,  
> \- the entries of 02, 08, 11, 15, 18, 20, 22, 23 and 29 November,  
> \- and the entries of 04, 10, 12, 13, 15, 19, 21-23 December and beyond were given notes.]


	4. Notes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> These are intended to supplement parts in the text that have not been explained in-narration by Thomas. Diaries are by definition a world unto themselves, where the author is seldom _explaining_ anything - why would they need to? It's a kind of code that they know from the beginning that they understand.   
>  Some references are blatant but others, like the translation-heavy parts, are detailed here.

**All I Was Doing Was Breathing (Notes)**

\--------------------

**Winter (1993-1994)**

* 27 January - There really is a small pâtisserie in _Rue Lepic_ , Montmartre. _Les Petits Mitrons?_  
* 29 January - _Silencio_ keeps coming up; Parisian nightclub, Daft Punk got kicked out of here once for not being dressed properly.  
* 03 February - Samuel Beckett; first mention, he will be quoted continuously through the fic.  
* 08 February - _Notre Dame de Paris._ Final sentence of all the 08 Feb entries is a quote from _Pirates of Penzance._  
* 24 February - Latin, ' _they condemn what they do not understand_ '. Second entry: Nine Inch Nails, in early 1994 only a small-scale band with only two albums out, Thomas is quoting from 'Something I Can Never Have' from _Pretty Hate Machine._

**Spring (1994)**

* 01 March - There has been at least a couple of reports of black markets and illegal livelihoods/cinemas/shops etc hidden away in the catacombs. _Place Joachim-du-Bellay_ is in the first _arrondissement_ of Paris, and where it stands now there used to be a market place - built right over the once festering _Cimetière des Saints-Innocents!_ Hundreds of bodies were dumped there every day, the largest cemetery in Paris, full of overflowing mass graves. It is from there that many skeletons currently in the Paris catacombs come from, when it was finally cleared out.  
* 04 March - The French pronunciation of 'courage'.  
* 18 March - A failed haiku.  
* 20 March - Évariste Galois is one mathematician associated with solving the quartic equation, but his proof was only indirectly related and he wasn't trying to solve it; Lodovico Ferrari should really get the credit.  
* 21 April - Glenn Gould played through Book 1 of Bach's _The Well-Tempered Clavier_ from 1963 to 1965.  
* 22 April - A Samuel Beckett poem, ' _dream / without end / nor ever / peace_ '.  
* 25 April - _Poisson d'avril_ \- pinning a paper fish to someone's back is a popular April Fools prank in France.  
* 27 April - _Les Thanatonautes_ is a 1994 French sci-fi thriller by Bernard Werber, about death and the afterlife being treated as the last 'unexplored continent'. If you can read French I recommend you check it out. Two decades on, it still reads beautifully.  
* 29 April - I come from a culture that still holds some strong shamanistic beliefs. I am also a mild animist. Thomas is not referring to any country, nationality or culture in particular - this is deliberate - but I am personally basing his descriptions and philosophy off how _we_ do it (in Korea). Making this note to clarify that this section is not appropriative or misunderstood.  
* 03 May - The flowers should all mean something along the lines of friendship, noticing one's absence, beauty, and gentle familial love.  
* 05 May - _Cloche à beurre_ \- French butter dish, in two parts: a vessel with water pooled inside, and a vessel where the butter goes in (that doubles as a lid). The latter is upturned and placed in the water, and the entire dish is kept in a cool place, keeping the butter fresh and spreadable.  
* 08 May - _Victoire 1945_ \- Victor in Europe Day, WWII-related public holiday. I wrote about this in _Wanderjahre_. 'Colours of freedom' correspond to the French flag.  
* 17 May - Alphonse Daudet and Michel de Montaigne. Victor Hugo also, writer of doorstoppers such as _Les Miserables_ and _Notre-Dame de Paris._  
* 18 May - _Trois Gymnopédies_ \- Erik Satie's compositions for the piano. Exquisitely lovely. Philosopher Hannah Arendt's political thought revolves strongly around the contrast of Grecian and modern views on human nature, the 'mortal' aspect being one of them.  
* 26 May - This recipe is valid. I also hate mayonnaise. _Moules-frites_ is often eaten with it.

**Summer (1994)**

* 08 June - Ingeborg Bachmann, German poet, is first quoted here: ' _All that which falls has wings_ '.  
* 09 June - Thomas's bouquet should connote a mixture of gratitude, innocence, young love/the feeling of being unable to go on, and his love for Guy.  
* 10 June - A Beckett poem, _'I would like my love to die / And the rain to be falling on the graveyard / And on me walking the streets / Mourning her who thought she loved me_ '.  
* 23 June - From Gregorio Allegri's _Miserere Mei, Deus_. Also Psalm 23, and also featured in _Electroma._  
* 24 June - Church of Saint-Sulpice. There is a beautiful sculpture of the Virgin Mary here.  
* 30 June - _Das Veilchen_ ('Violet') is a _lieder_ by Mozart with words from Goethe. Erika Köth sung it in 1967; the song itself is about a young man's heart being broken.  
* 01 July – Eugène Ionesco and Anaïs Nin.  
* 04 July - ' _Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori_ ' is Latin for _'it is sweet and glorious to die for one's country_ '. You might know it from Horace or Wilfred Owen's poetry. This entry is also not intended to be an objective judgement about patriotism in the USA.  
* 09 July - Hardly anyone ever mentions Hugo's poetry...  
* 12 July - The _Liebestod_ here refers to the final aria sung in Wagner's _Tristan und Isolde._  
* 13 July - A Bachmann poem (Reigen), ' _we've seen the eyes of the dead / and will forget them never / love lasts to the end / but apprehends us never'_.  
* 16 July - Jean Genet directed this film in the 1950s. It was considered too obscene for its time; even now it comes across as a powerful example of the so-called 'queer cinema'. I recommend it highly, and Genet's works in general. Jean-Paul Sartre wrote an essay about him called 'Saint Genet', which Thomas is referencing.  
* 21 July - They did fight at Ibiza. I don't know why exactly.  
* 25 July - Lines 2/4 of the Paris Métro. The truck incident happened in reality on April 1994, the night Kurt Cobain was found dead; I've adjusted the times/dates for this fic, but this entry is the homage to this incident, and the connection Daft Punk themselves made to Cobain's death.  
* 05 August - Sven Hansen-Løve. Brother of Mia Hansen-Løve, director of _Eden_. He was confirmed to be a friend of DP at least from the time 'Da Funk' was first debuted, which is admittedly later than 1994; but I thought it not improbable that they'd had some acquaintance earlier.

**Autumn (1994)**

* 22 September - More a general note, but Argenteuil is a suburb on the outskirts of Paris. Maybe 9 mins away by train.   
* 23 September - St. Christopher is the patron saint of travellers.   
* 27 September - Mircea Eliade, Romanian philosopher; the long philosophical exploration into the nature of 'home' is a shortened summary of his argument in his book, _Myths, Dreams and Mysteries_. It's actually a more religious argument than what I've made it out to be, but I think it works fine on its own. The Hugo poem is an excerpt from ' _Le Deuil_ ' ('Mourning') - ' _Truth is sufficient guide; no more man needs / Than end so nobly shown / Mourning, but brave, I march; where duty leads / I seek the vast unknown_ '.  
* 30 September - Lustral is a trade name for Sertraline, an SSRI. Those symptoms and side effects are broadly accurate, though of course the exact effects vary from person to person. 1994 is about when this drug first became available.  
* 19 October - This is a real restaurant actually located in the nineteenth _arrondissement_. It's been there since the seventies at the very least.  
* 25 October - Jean Racine and Jack Kerouac.   
* 28 October - Colombes is another outer-Parisian suburb located a few kilometres away from Argenteuil.  
* 02 November - A Beckett poem, ' _Saturday respite / more laughter / from midnight / until midnight / no crying_ '.  
* 08 November - A Browning poem, 'Life In a Love'. Can be found in his poetry collection, Men and Women. For additional context reading Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poetry such as 'If Thou Must Love Me' is necessary. The tale about their elopement is also true, though it was not as easy as Thomas put it, nor were the lovers _young_ when they fled to Venice.  
* 11 November - The blue cornflower ( _bleuet_ ) is used as the symbol of memory and solidarity in France. Poppies are the equivalent in the Commonwealth.  
* 15 November - Mons is a Belgian city.  
* 18 November - The _hachis Parmentier_ might be best understood as a French analogue to shepherd's pie - layer of mashed potatoes above diced meat and Lyonnaise sauce, and baked in the oven.  
* 20 November - _Pulp Fiction_. Its French premiere seems to have been in November 1994. Thomas would still have had to sit through many scenes of violence, a near-fatal drug overdose, Christopher Walken's bizarre soliloquy, and a couple of murders before he even got to the car chase, but...  
* 22 November – The authors of Thomas’s books are Anais Nin, Albert Camus, and Ingeborg Bachmann (in that order). 50mg is a common starter dose for Lustral/Sertraline. Based off my personal experience.  
* 23 November - All potential side effects are ones that can be caused by the above, though it's basically an individual roulette as to what applies and what does not. If you're fortunate none of this will happen to you.  
* 29 November - The song is ' _Heirat_ ' from _Cabaret_. The movie specifically. Greta Keller sings it. Its lyrics translate differently to the English version, but I prefer this one better; give it a listen, I highly recommend it.

**Winter (1994-1995)**

* 04 December – Nantes has a fine arts museum. Monet’s works have been displayed in it for a long time, and they still are as far as I know.  
* 10 December – ‘ _Ne me quitte pas_ ’, the French classic.  
* 12 December – Guy’s great-grandfather, Francisco Manuel Homem Cristo, was indeed a fascist. Quite a prolific one too.  
* 13 December – Thomas is quoting Nietzsche. ‘ _Die Ewige Wiederkunft’_ - > ‘eternal return’.  
* 15 December – Leiji Matsumoto’s _Captain Harlock._  
* 19 December – ‘ _Sillage’_ is French for ‘trace of someone’s perfume’ amongst other meanings generally involving the idea of trails. For someone who said they don’t believe in psychoanalysis, Thomas puts a lot of store into the _eros-thanatos_ conflict…  
* 21-23 December – Algernon Charles Swinburne, ‘A Leave-Taking’. The original has ‘she’ throughout. ‘My mouth is so dry that if my own life depended on it I couldn't spit’ is a quote from Capote’s _Breakfast at Tiffany’s._  
* Misc. notes until the end – I’m not actually sure what makes beached whales/dolphins/etc do what they do, but I think they are more than capable of the standard ‘cognition’ we like to attribute to thoughts of suicide and personal injury. Hermann Hesse’s quote is from _Steppenwolf._


End file.
